[fpc-devel] FPC Branches

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Michael Schnell said:
>   On 07/12/2010 11:51 AM, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> > But more importantly, what would be the use of supporting Prism?
> Before bashing me: I don _not_ vote for starting this really huge 
> project, but nonetheless I think it would be great to have.

It is not bashing. It is stimulating you to come up with something better
than pointing at some isolated syntax like paralel as motivation to support an
hugely complex framework that involves frontend, backend AND libraries.

The question is if the implementation even survived the move from a managed
GCed environment to a native non-GC one.

> (1) Delphi Prism adds a lot of interesting language constructs such as 
> parallel execution. Of course with Prism this is done using the .NET 
> infrastructure, but such things of course also can be implemented in the 
> RTL so that a native compiler could handle it. (No comment regarding 
> garbage collection etc, as this already was mentioned by the Hans-Peter 
> regarding Oberon.)

> (2) I feel that using .NET / Mono as an "architecture" to compile to, 
> would be a great addition, too, and while it's not viable with the 
> "native" Pascal dialect, Prism takes care of presenting the paradigms 
> decently to the programmer.

But why? What does it make possible? What would you use it for in practice,
that you can't use Prism+mono for?

(not the ideal case of "just press the button and recompile, and slap mono
under it", but a realistic scenario, with incompatibilities, version lag
etc, several years to implement, at which point Prism maybe already is
canned)

Prism is not horrible expensive like Delphi, and can sometimes be had for
$99.
 
> > If you want paralel, take vector pascal, and implement it in e.g. the FPC or
> > objfpc dialect.
> I suppose this is a good idea, even tough I suppose that the .Net 
> "parallel" paradigm is a lot more broadly known than that of Vector 
> Pascal. so Hans-Peter might want to add VP to his list.
> Moreover "parallel" only is one example of Prism "goodies" that might be 
> great to have.

Like what? As said, parallel is not really Prism specific. Nearly any significant
language sooner or later had a port or branch that experimented, even Pascal
(see vector pascal, a TP dialect based one).

So I still don't really have an idea why you would want it, and what you
would do with it, except "nice goodies" as description and probably a liking
for "method" instead of "procedure/function".

And then I'm not even speaking if it is doable and worth it, and just
restricting myself to the WHY?