[fpc-devel] Free Pascal 2.4.2 minimal distros for fpGUI available

[Paul Breneman]

Henry Vermaak wrote:
> On 15/11/10 13:13, Paul Breneman wrote:
>> Michael Schnell wrote:
>>> On 11/14/2010 03:09 AM, Paul Breneman wrote:
>>>> This web page has i386 Win32 and ARM WinCE cross-compiler zips that
>>>> include everything needed (no install necessary) to test FPC 2.4.2
>>>> with the fpGUI 0.7 release (Aug 2010):
>>>> http://www.turbocontrol.com/easyfpgui.htm
>>>>
>>>> The i386 Linux version is almost ready. Email me if you want to test
>>>> a private copy of that distro.
>>>>
>>> Great !
>>>
>>> I's like to take a look at the ARM-Linux cross tool chain !
>>
>> Note that I wrote that i386 Linux is almost ready. ARM Linux isn't
>> coming soon unless there is an official release for that platform, and
>> that hasn't happened since the 2.2.2 release.
>>
>>> Special request: remote debugging vie Ethernet would be very desirable.
>>
>> Indeed!
> 
> This only concerns the toolchain.  All you need is gdbserver for your 
> target machine and an arm-linux-gdb on your host machine.

Thanks Henry for that info.

I try hard to write Pascal programs without using pointers and without 
allocating or deallocating memory.  If the RTL is reliable (when it does 
those things behind the scenes) then all of *my* bugs are logical (and 
shouldn't crash the program) and usually a few debug or log messages 
will be all that is needed (and many times I don't even need those). 
That has worked very well for me since 1985 since the TurboPascal RTL 
always seemed *very* reliable.  In 1995 the VCL wasn't quite as solid 
but still pretty good...

And since Pascal strings can contain nulls I never have to allocate 
buffers in my communication programs but rather I just use (safe) 
strings there as well.

I'd like to take the minimal distros and add a simple option to use 
MSEide and it supports debugging from what I understand.  Then maybe 
extending that with remote debugging would be the next item.

I know that you and many other experts on this list already have this 
stuff figured out, but I've had to spend my time on a lot of other 
things.  The minimal distros started out as my method of trying to 
reduce things as much as possible when I started programming on ARM 
Linux.  I am amazed at how simple the Free Pascal "hello world" distro 
is, so it has been quite an education for me to go all the way down to 
that and then build things on top of that in various ways.

Are there other open source development tools with which I could do 
Windows and Linux minimal distros?  If so I'm interested in adding those 
to the web site.

It is neat how, especially for Windows, there are basically no 
requirements.  Well, I guess ZIP support wasn't in the OS before XP so 
that is one requirement.  :)  Right now I'm trying to figure out how to 
provide something for the Linux distro that works as simply as the 
compile.bat does on Windows.

Yesterday at work I started using the latest Win32 and WinCE minimal 
distros to develop a very simple fpGUI program for a nice PDA.  I'll 
develop mostly on Win32 and test occasionally on WinCE and the actual 
device.  It is nice to use the fruits of my *long* day Saturday.  :) 
Most of all I'm thankful for the great Free Pascal and fpGUI tools that 
allow such efficient development environments!

I guess I wrote what should be a blog article somewhere...  :)