[fpc-devel] FPC related fairy tale

[Sven Barth]

Am 19.10.2012 15:13, schrieb 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.
>

I wouldn't wonder if Alpha was sold more than Itanium ;)

> 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.

That nobody is producing Alpha (or Alpha-like) chips anymore is the 
biggest problem with it. So only have legacy devices and emulators to 
work on...

> 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.
>

As Android and JVM ports are working ports I don't say anything about 
them (especially since I already used the Android port to write an 
application for my phone). The LLVM port is not even in trunk yet, so I 
don't say anything about it either. But I don't know what state Vis is 
in especially since I don't know what VM it does use exactly.

Regards,
Sven