[fpc-devel] Freepascal in microcontrollers

[Jonas Maebe]

On 27 Feb 2008, at 13:42, Vinzent Hoefler wrote:

> On Wednesday 27 February 2008 12:56, Jonas Maebe wrote:
>
>> "bitpacked" was introduced in version 2.2.0 (which is the latest
>> official release).
>
> See, and that's a problem im production code. The project started at  
> the
> time where 1.0.10 was current (and a couple of months later I used the
> 1.9.6 release candidate), but due to several show-stoppers (thread
> leaks, random XML parser crashes) I'm currently stuck to version  
> 2.0.0.

I simply said that "bitpacked", being  a major new feature (in terms  
of changes to the code generator), was introduced in a newer major  
release than what you are testing (as described in 2.2.0 release  
notes). Major releases can indeed more easily introduce major new bugs  
and incompatibilities.

If you want to help reduce that to a minimum, you can test pre-release  
versions, in order to see whether there are regressions which aren't  
caught by our test suites. If you don't have the time for that, you  
can just test the releases when they are out and hope for the best. I  
can guarantee you that every single new release will probably break  
something different. Whether or not it's something you use, nobody can  
tell in advance (except you).

And no, I'm not saying it's your fault if something you use breaks in  
a newer release, I'm merely saying it's nobody else's fault in  
particular either (at least not most of the time).

> And let me guess: There's no way to specify how the Endianess of the
> bitpacked type should be interpreted regardless of the target system?

As I said it's an opaque construct (so no control or guarantees  
whatsoever about the layout) and it was not written with hardware  
interfacing in mind (regardless of what other people like to promote  
it for).


Jonas