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

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Tue, 4 Nov 2008, schreef Michael Schnell:

>
>> The point is those compilers cannot provide it because of (a) technical 
>> limitations, 
> I don't think this is true. GCC can compile Java which I think is an object 
> language in a similar extend as Object pascal is. And it seems to be 
> similarly "rich", though of course in different directions.

While I do not deny this, I want to say is that our code generator has a 
lot of support for Object Pascal specific features that are for 
certain not available inside the GCC backend. This includes 
resourcestring, but also Pascal objects/classes, interfaces and more.

It might be possible to work around it (after all GCC is Turing complete 
so any program should be implementable on the backend in theory), it would 
never become the same quality implementation that we have now.

Daniël