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

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Michael Schnell said:
> > How much do you need on a PIC ?
> >   
> I did not have many hope for really using Pascal on the PIC, but I am 
> just thinking about a project with a PIC24 (which is a quite normal 16 
> bit processor core with 64K linear addressable memory (completely 
> integrated in the chip)

Yes, but most come with only 8k :-) Only recent roadmaps seem to finally
have some with more memory.

Well, I gave up PIC24 since they don't contain motorcontrol, so I'm now
using their big brother dspic33 (the 100 pin variants). Though apparantly
that is now a new architecture, because since a few weeks, both have an own
compiler.

>,other than the PIC16, which is an 8 Bit processor with no "memory" bit
> only "Registers" in multiple 256 Byte banks).

I never used those, but their brother, the PIC18, which is roughly the same
with some additional regs to make a compiler workable. Still a 256 byte page
though.

> Here I in fact need to port part of an existing Delphi project (a master 
> node of a serial communication network).

But serial access in both is on the level "put a byte in a register, and
wait for a bit to be set", not componentized like e.g. cport or async. The
overhead would kill you.