[fpc-devel] Re: FPC related fairy tale

[Sven Barth]

On 18.10.2012 13:13, Sven Barth wrote:
> Once upon a time there was a small kingdom ruled by a kind king. The
> king had two daughters and more children were planned to come. But the
> king had already problems to find approbiate rooms for his second child.
> So he ordered his mages to reconstruct the castle in a way that the
> ever-growing family can easily be accommodated.
> The mages immediately began with their work and reshaped the castle with
> their spells. But as the work on the castle neared its completion a
> terrible accident happend to the second princess when she played between
> the working mages. She was no longer able to walk or even sit upright
> without support. The mages tried their best to heal her, but in the end
> they needed to finish the castle so that the royal family could have
> their home back before the winter strikes. But even after the castle had
> been finished they didn't have enough time for the disabled princess as
> the family had already grown during the mages' work and required their
> full attention. And so the days and months passed by in which the second
> daughter of the king was confined to her room and could not join in the
> family's activities.
> Then one day a young mage came along and joined the mages of the castle.
> He helped them with maintaining the magically enhanced castle, but while
> searching for places to fix and further extend he stumpled upon the room
> of the isolated princess. He felt sorry for the girl's state and
> although he did not know much about healing magic he decided to improve
> his knowledge and help the her. So he spent the evenings after his
> normal work at the castle in the library and looked through the books
> about healing magic. Sometimes he then went to the princess' chamber and
> applied his newly learned knowledge.
> After some weeks his work finally paid off and the girl was able to feel
> and move her legs again. And after some more time she was finally able
> to walk again. Although she needed to move slowly and with the help of
> crutches, she was finally able to take part in the life at the castle
> again. The young mage continued to heal her and they all lived happily
> ever after.
>
> So... now I'm curious what you think I have worked on and I'm also
> curious whether someone can fully "decipher" that little story. :)

Before I forget it: here is the meaning of the story elements:

small kingdom => FPC project + community (small compared to e.g. the C 
"kingdom" ;) )
the royal family => the compiler with
   the king => the "fpc" binary
   the children => the single "ppcX" binaries (with "ppcX" and 
"ppcrossX" being together as one)
     the oldest child => x86 (the platform on which Florian developed 
FPC on)
     the second oldest child => m68k (the first platform after x86 that 
he compiler was ported to and which lead to the insight that the code 
generator needs to be redesigned)
     all the other younger children => arm, powerpc(64), sparc, 
mips(el), x86_64, jvm (, aarch64 ;) ) - most of them were "born" during 
the rewrite
     (not mentioned, but the children that are dead (at least so far) => 
alpha, itanium, vis)
the mages => the compiler developers
the rebuilding of the castle => the code generator rewrite (and I like 
the result very much! :D )
the "accident" => m68k never got fully rewritten
the "young mage" => me :)
the healing => fixing the m68k code generator
the need to use crutches => m68k starts to compile simple applications 
again (the current state I'd describe as "heavily limping without 
crouches" by the way)

I hope now it's more clear what I wanted to tell with the story. Some 
parts might indeed not be that obvious (e.g. that the king is the "fpc" 
binary; he could have been "King FPK" as well ;) ), but I had not 
imagined that it's that unobvious...

Regards,
Sven