[fpc-devel] Interface scope incompatibility with Delphi

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Op 2010-11-11 15:31, Michael Van Canneyt het geskryf:
> If guarantees are needed:
> Meanwhile, one can buy a support contract from http://www.lazarussupport.com/.

A applaud them for starting that, but that business is only related to
Lazarus development as far as I understand, it does not touch/affect the
Free Pascal Compiler project.


> Not that paying is any guarantee. I have still several bugreports open with 
> Borland, both for Delphi and Kylix. Same for other products.

In all due respect Michael, you are missing the point. Using a framework or
component set is not the problem. Like you mentioned, simply delve into the
code and fix the issue yourself. The language compiler on the other hand,
is a totally different beast. If I fix the problem on my side, it doesn't
help anybody else, because their compiler doesn't contain that fix (and as
this thread shows, not everything will be accepted into the FPC source - no
matter who is commissioned to implement the patch).

Creating developer tools has another problem of it's own. Unlike Delphi,
there is no stable, long term shipment of compiled units and specific FPC
version, so in the world of FPC, developers tools must ship as source code.
This again raise the issue with bugs in the compiler itself. I may have my
compiler patched, but others will not, so I can't rely on my compiler
behaviour in those developer tools for other developers to use.

In fact, I have a crap load of code sitting idle in a private fpGUI branch,
simply waiting for FPC to one day ship with "interface delegation" support
back-ported to FPC Fixes branch, or to be included in the next major
release. So I have a solution for something, but I can't release the code,
because I'm waiting on FPC. And FPC having a release rollout that takes
longer that 9 months to happen sure doesn't help the process either. 2.4.2
was tagged in June, and we are still nowhere near the actual release as far
as I know - almost 6 months later. So by the time it is released, it will
immediately be about one year old [taking an estimate here] already.



Regards,
  - Graeme -

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://opensoft.homeip.net:8080/fpgui/