[fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC status

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Mon, 24 Dec 2012, Martin Schreiber wrote:

>
>>> - Produce at least as good code as Delphi 7.
>>> - Compile at least as fast as Delphi 7.
>>
>> You know that sacrifices need to be made to make a compiler cross
>> platform and easily portable.  You can't have it all.
>>
> We will see.

It would be good if, prior to forking off, you would do some study 
and post some proposals here.

As long as your proposals do not include reducing the number 
of platforms/CPUs (an obvious optimization), I'm sure they 
will get serious consideration:

Everybody is aware of the speed difference between Delphi and FPC.

The compiling itself (parsing/producing assembler code) is not slow.
>From what I remember, the problems you (and everyone else) experience 
with smartlinking and so on are largely due to the GNU linker being 
slow and memory hungry.

What concerns produced code: I think that the largest speed gain there 
will come from a reorganisation of the exception handling.

What concerns 'stripping the unnecessary' : if you are talking 
about language features, I doubt you will gain much speed by that.

I am also fairly confident that if you would create a patch to 
introduce a new compiler mode switch {$MODE D7} which would 
selectively enable/disable some language features to "go back 
to the roots", it would be accepted. (I myself would use it ;))

In each case, by doing so, a wider community would benefit from your efforts.
(I am assuming, of course, that this interests you).

Michael.