[fpc-pascal] FPC + fpGUI + Raspberry Pi = fantastic

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi,

I received my Raspberry Pi today, and had a bit of a play. I'm using the 
Debian 6 OS with my Pi. I downloaded the FPC+fpGUI ARM archive (only a 
3.5MB download), packaged by Paul Breneman.

   http://www.turbocontrol.com/easyfpgui.htm

[Awesome work there, Paul. You can get much easier than than. Just 
unpack and you are ready to work.]

It works fantastically well. I could compile all the fpGUI demos without 
me having to do anything extra in fpGUI. How cool is that! :-)

All I had to do to get my projects to link successfully, was to install 
a few missing packages, which were not included with the Debian 6 distro 
for the Pi.

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install libX11-dev libXft-dev

I'll have to speak to somebody to see if they could include it as 
standard - after all, the Pi is meant for developers to play with. If 
anybody has contacts, please let me know.

I even compiled and ran the more complex fpGUI apps like the GUI Forms 
Designer, DocView (help viewer), and Maximus (a sample fpGUI IDE). Even 
FPTest (my Free Pascal Unit Testing project works).

We (our company) have some big plans for the Raspberry Pi, with a 
potentially huge deployment. The first tests with this device is very 
promising.

Kudos must also go to the FPC team, for supporting ARM so well!

Maybe with the Raspberry Pi and Free Pascal, we can get Object Pascal 
back on the map, and in the hands of young developers. After all, Pascal 
was initially designed as a teaching language - easy to learn, read and 
write.


Regards,
   - Graeme -