[fpc-devel] In FPC written FPC Debugger

[Jonas Maebe]

On 22 Feb 2008, at 11:24, Florian Klaempfl wrote:

> Jonas Maebe schrieb:
>>
>> On 22 Feb 2008, at 09:32, Florian Klaempfl wrote:
>>
>>> GDB is written in C, even worse it is written in a 80th hackish  
>>> style
>>> using tons of macros. Most advanced pascal programmers can read it  
>>> but
>>> writing or even debugging is another matter.
>>
>> It is not /that/ hard to debug
>
> But it is hard for people knowing C not that well but knowing pascal,
> that's what I meant.

If you can read the gdb sources, you can also debug it. I speak from  
experience, and I'm really not a C expert. It does take a while before  
you can find your way in the sources, but the same goes for any big  
project.

It's obvious that if gdb were written in Pascal, more Pascal  
programmers could easily contribute to it. But I personally do not  
consider that downside big enough to rewrite the whole thing from  
scratch in Pascal (at least not for Mac OS X and Linux; and other  
people are obviously free to spend their time however they like).

> Would you ever have be able to contribute to fpc if
> the compiler had been written in C (yes, I did a prototype in C in '93
> because I wanted a 32 Bit compiler to bootstrap :) )?

Not at that time (I didn't know C at all in 1997).

>> On unix (at least on Linux and Mac OS X) it is trivial to compile
>> (./configure ; make).
>
> Yes, and then you can go drinking 3 cups of coffee ;) even using a
> modern machine and not considering the unix centric approach it uses.

It's true that the first build takes a long time (especially if you,  
like me, build it on a network volume). But after that the incremental  
builds don't take that long.


Jonas