[fpc-devel] Why is FPC so self-contained ?

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2008, Michael Schnell wrote:

> AFAIK FPC works quite similar, but while only the "parser" really knows about
> the programming language, it comes with it's own preprocessor (which is only
> used optionally), it's own code generator and it's own linker. AFAIK, it even
> provides it's own "make" to compile multiple files.

This last is not correct. it's regular make.

> 
> I could imagine a system that only provides a Pascal-to-RTL-parser and uses
> many of the GNU tools (preprocessor <optionally>, optimizer, code generator,
> linker, make).
> 
> This would just provide another language for GCC and for hopefully allow me to
> use FPC-Pascal for any processor architecture supported by GCC.
> 
> Are there other than historical reasons that FPC is this "self-contained" ? (I
> suppose compiling speed is an issue here, so a "GCC compatible parser" might
> only be an additional tool provided by the FPC team, but I'd really love to
> use this for my embedded projects.)

We don't want to depend on the work of other people. Do do what you want
would also mean that the RTL depends on libc, and this is totally out of
the question.

What you want is done by GPC and p2c.

Michael.