[fpc-devel] Interface scope incompatibility with Delphi

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Graeme Geldenhuys said:
> 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.

The Delphi version has a different version every version (except 2007) and
updates stop 9 months after a version came out (except emergency fixes,
which are more like "debugger doesn't work on new versions of Windows", not
real fixes.

A typical FPC release frequency is 9 months. (2.2.4 in may 2008, 2.4.0
in january 2009, 2.4.2 today)

You might not be able to patch the FPC compiler and distribute .ppu's,
but neither can you patch the Delphi compiler.

So I don't see a difference for released versions.