[fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC status

[Sven Barth]

On 25.12.2012 12:13, Martin Schreiber wrote:
> 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.

AFAIK Delphi's command line compiler does not allow you to skip the 
assembling and linking phase, so the fairest comparison would be to 
compare the compilation of a single unit as there the linking phase is 
skipped. If Delphi is still better there then there are two 
possibilities: improve the internal assembler or the parser/code 
generator. Please keep in mind though that FPC's code generator is 
written in such a way that the backend can be switched rather easily. As 
we learned with the developer's blog entries about Delphi XE2 this 
wasn't the case with Delphi XE and older. So it could be that you can 
never reach the speed of Delphi 7's compiler as FPC is more portable.

Regards,
Sven