[fpc-devel] Re: PDF on C/C++ code in Free Pascal

[Sven Barth]

Jonas Maebe schrieb:
> 
> On 16 Sep 2009, at 20:09, Sven Barth wrote:
> 
>> Jonas Maebe schrieb:
>>> As far as I know, there is not a single test for this functionality, 
>>> so I'm not sure that it actually works.
>>
>> Well... then I think it's time to change this.
>>
>> I'll try to test this functionality (and to fix it, if it fails),
> 
> Thanks!

But I can't say when I'll have the time for it. Some weeks/months more 
won't matter with this old feature ^^

> 
> Frankly, I don't really know. I only discovered this by chance while 
> working on the Objective-C support. As far as I could tell, you simply 
> have to use "cppclass" rather than "class", and that's it (the cppdecl 
> name mangling style is automatically applied to all methods afterwards, 
> if I remember correctly). I don't think that field accesses can work at 
> all though, nor calling virtual methods (let alone defining multiple 
> inheritance hierarchies). The only thing that really seemed to be 
> implemented was C++ name mangling.
> 

Virtual methods would have been cool... So we would be able to import e. 
g. the Irrlicht library in a very easy way ^^


(although I think this message will be posted between Jonas' and 
Florian's, I will quote Florian here, cause I'm using digest mode and 
don't know how to answer him more directly (in the list))

 >
 > The code is already very old. It worked for very simply classes and
 > gcc 2.95 iirc. But nobody continued so far to improve it.
 >

The little searching that I did in the compiler's source tells me that 
it already supports gcc 3.x (and with this 4.x) name mangling. So it 
*should* work with gcc 3+. But whether it works is indeed another story ^^

If someone would be willing to extend this feature (virtual methods, 
perhaps multiple inheritance) would this be welcomed? I don't know if 
I'll find the time to do that, but I think it would certainly increase 
my knowledge about the compiler ^^ (but first I'll steer the Native NT 
port into a save harbour :) )

Regards,
Sven