[fpc-pascal] FPC 3.0 + MIPS Linux

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Juha Manninen wrote:
> According to this :
>   http://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,30500.msg194271.html
> FPC 3.0 MIPS version for Linux works through cross-compilation.
> It is not mentioned in release notes. Android  + MIPS is mentioned.
> 
> I may buy a MIPS gadget later to see why Lazarus does not work.
> I believe there will be more MIPS TV-box class computers in future.
> 
> Are there any news about FPC MIPS version that I should know about?

All I can say is that a couple of years ago I was able to confirm that 
both endiannesses of FPC worked on MIPS (hosted on Qemu) to the extent 
that they would self-build, but it wasn't quite up to Lazarus. The wiki 
page I (mostly) wrote 
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Native_MIPS_Systems suggests this was 
actually November '12, which was probably fairly early in the lifetime 
of 2.7.1... I'd imagine a lot has changed since.

Imagination are aware of FPC and Lazarus and my contact there was 
generally enthusiastic when I last discussed it (probably ~18 months 
ago). However in view of the low price of their development boards I 
think the best thing would just be to get one and see how it works out, 
if there were some killer app that we could dangle in front of them it 
could work out well for everybody. http://store.imgtec.com/uk/

I don't off-hand know which endianness these boards are, I think the 
board used by the Debian MIPS maintainer is jumper-selectable. I've got 
a couple of SGI MIPS systems here but have never felt up to 
investigating an FPC IRIX port.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]