[fpc-devel] 2.0.4-rc3 available

[Tomas Hajny]

Marco van de Voort wrote:
>> Dave Parsons wrote:
>> > Has there been any discussion/attempt to get away from GDB and
>> > integrate a native FPC solution? Using an external debugger
>> > doesn't seem ideal to me.
>>
>> It isn't ideal indeed. Creating a debugger requires some time, though.
>> You
>> need modules for reading the individual executable formats (as used on
>> the
>> different platforms), modules related to CPU-specific handling plus
>> modules related to platform specific handling. The docs are available,
>> though, as well as sources of some other debuggers (for inspiration) -
>> GDB, SDD386, (WD)Sibyl (written in Pascal and supporting Pascal syntax
>> at
>> least), etc.
>
> VP also I believe. Alan said we could have his sources for such purposes
> if
> we need them, and at the time debugger and OS/2 specific reasons were the
> most important
> reason to get them.

VP sources aren't available (except for a small group of people who were
granted the right to work on fixes and updates in the past). Alan
officially rejected all requests to make VP sources publicly available
(only RTL sources were published) - most probably because his own rights
wouldn't allow that, or possibly because he might have been afraid of
possible troubles with Borland (pure speculation here). VP would be
certainly my preference (especially with regard to the compatibility level
with TP/BP and thus high reuseability potential for FPC).

BTW, I obviously forgot to mention OpenWatcom as another (OS/2) debugger
where the sources are available too.


> Most of this was done via chat though, so some confirmation from Alan that
> I
> can pass the src on would be nice.

I explicitely asked him via e-mail in the past whether he would be willing
to give us sources of the debugger part (immediately after he announced
official death of VP), but I didn't receive any response... :-(

Tomas