[fpc-devel] About ppudump program

[Doriano Blengino]

Hi,

I am writing a Freepascal IDE in Linux+GTK2 (using freepascal, of 
course!). I attach a screenshot for your curiosity, just in case.

At this time I am trying to finish a good auto-completion, so I need to 
extract symbols from pre-compiled PPUs (especially the runtime standard 
libraries). Right now I use ppudump(1) to extract symbols, but I could 
switch in future to the use of ppu.pas. I noticed that different 
freepascal releases do not share a common PPU file format, so using 
ppu.pas inside the IDE would force the user to use the same compiler 
version as the one used to compile the IDE. On the other hand, I noticed 
that the release 2.4.x is the first one which reports "v100" for a PPU 
file, which hopefully indicates that future releases could be 
PPU-compatible...

Now, I would ask an advice: is it better to stick to ppudump, at a price 
of some reduction in speed, and the risk that its output could change in 
future, invalidating the IDE parsing routines? Or is it better to use 
ppu.pas in the IDE, having confidence that ppu.pas will parse PPU file 
generated by different versions/releases of freepascal?

Thanks in advance for your reply, and best regards.

Doriano Blengino

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