[fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC status

[Dimitri Smits]

----- Oorspronkelijk e-mail -----
> Van: "Florian Klaempfl" <florian at freepascal.org>
> Aan: "FPC developers' list" <fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org>
> Verzonden: Dinsdag 25 december 2012 14:15:24
> Onderwerp: Re: [fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC status
> 
> 
> I see no way to speed up the 2.x FPC significantly only by stripping
> something down or whatever. The whole 2.x design is geared towards
> portability and maintainability, speed is only 2nd level goal (and
> being
> honest, self compilation in ~10 sec even on my >5 year old Core 2 Duo
> is
> not that bad ;)).

I'm guessing that is NOT on a Windows platform? Every full build (it has been a while) I've ever done of the compiler on windows was at least a few minutes.

what I *think* is a large hog on compilation/linking is the spawning of multiple executables in the different steps as opposed to the monolithic exe(+dll) that dcc32.exe is.

> The only approach I see to speed it up is to kick the whole back end
> and
> generate directly some close to i386 intermediate code directly in
> the
> parser.

lovely, but isn't that what Embarcadero is doing for their future compiler? Using the llvm toolchain, they will provide a front compiler to an intermediate "language" or interpreted code. Then they have a few optimisations for the middle layer and use the back-ends that are already available to make stuff architecturally compile to whatever back-end (ARM v?, intel x86, powerpc, motorola 68k, jvm, dalvik, .net il, compiled php, ... or any community or custom backend)

kind regards,
Dimitri Smits