[fpc-devel] FPC related fairy tale

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Sven Barth wrote:
> [This should have gone to the list, instead of Florian directly]
> 
> On 18.10.2012 20:55, Florian Klämpfl wrote:
>  > Am 18.10.2012 13:24, schrieb Pierre Free Pascal:
>  >>   Are you resurrecting m68k port?
>  >>
>  >> Just a guess, of course...
>  >
>  > Too late, but it would have been my guess as well. The tale misses only
>  > the very sad part about the two children who never made it to life ;(
> 
> I see that I should have waited a bit longer then ^^
> 
> Yes... that could be mentioned as well... (and what about "vis"? ) 
> though Itanium looks in my opinion more dead for real than M68k 
> (considering the existance of Coldfire)... and Alpha is also only 
> available if you can find a legacy system

I'd love to see an Itanium port, but I don't think it's realistic in 
view of the limited number of manufacturers shipping systems based on it 
and the known difficulty of filling the bundles. I haven't had a chance 
of looking at GCC output to see how well their backend does, but the 
last I heard it was difficult to get even 75% utilisation. Add to that 
the the opcode set etc. is weird: SPARC-style register windows with none 
of the charm.

To my surprise I've got an Alpha system, but my understanding is that 
nobody's making silicon any more. Since Chinese manufacturers appear to 
have settled on MIPS as their non-x86 of choice, I don't see much future 
for it.

Vis, LLVM, and- of course- the Android and JVM ports are obviously 
valuable. Apart from that the only architecture that FPC doesn't support 
is the IBM S/390.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]