[fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC status

[Martin Schreiber]

On Tuesday 25 December 2012 11:20:02 Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>
> 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.
>
AFAIK there are significant differences in parsing and code producing too. 
Last time I checked on Windows with the internal FPC linker Delphi 7 compiled 
and linked about 10 times as fast as FPC.

> 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.
>
The goal here is to reduce the count of the used different concepts so one has 
not to learn much to tap the full potential of the language.

> 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 ;))
>
It would unfortunately blow up the code base again.

Martin