[fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC status

[Martin Schreiber]

On Friday 21 December 2012 18:16:06 Florian Klämpfl wrote:
> Am 21.12.2012 09:23, schrieb Martin Schreiber:
> > On Tuesday 18 December 2012 19:07:47 Florian Klämpfl wrote:
> >> Am 17.12.2012 10:36, schrieb Graeme Geldenhuys:
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> Any FPC developer willing to comment on the status of some of these
> >>> issues (that have been years overdue)?
> >>
> >> It narrows basically down to the fact that fpc lacks developers and
> >> contributors, or do I miss something?
> >
> > Don't you think after more than a year of decision-making about Unicode
> > it is necessary for a serious compiler to actually make and communicate a
> > decision?
>
> See mail from Michael.
>
Thanks.

> > Don't you think for a serious compiler there should be communicated
> > design goals
>
> The mission goal of FPC is: develop an open source pascal compiler
> written in pascal in a community effort.
>
Thanks.

> > and the missing pieces and necessary boring improvements should be done
> > before adding sexy new things?
>
> Maybe people should indeed first work on the compiler instead of
> developing another gui and ide.

In 1999? There was no other useful gui and ide for Free Pascal IIRC.

> I cannot tell you neither any other 
> developer what they have to develop. We could close down all write
> accesses to fpc svn till the features you need are developed but I fear
> you won't get them either this way. People would just fork fpc or fpc
> would die. So what do you propose?
>
I propose to extend and render more precisely the mission goals of FPC and to 
concentrate the power on the defined goals.

> > Or is FPC simply a playground for the FPC-developers?
> > Then that should be
> > communicated too and I probably was wrong to invest so much time into the
> > development of MSEide+MSEgui.
>
> If nobody is interested in features you need, bad luck for you, you have
> three possibilities: develop them yourself, pay somebody to develop them
> or use another compiler.

Thanks for the message.
I must say, in MSEide+MSEgui project the things are handled a little bit 
different. For example I never planned to internationalize MSEide because it 
complicates things, is a boring task and I did not see a benefit. Now a 
Russian speaking user convinced me, that MSEide can be used in Russian 
schools only, if translated to Russian. I liked the idea to use our loved 
Free Pascal in schools, so I took the boring task and moved the string 
constants to tstringcontainer so it can be translated. Remember, FPC does not 
support Unicode resource strings up to now. ;-)

Martin