[fpc-devel] Comparison FPC 2.6.2 - Delphi 7

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sat, 2 Mar 2013, Craig Peterson wrote:

>
>
> On Mar 2, 2013, at 3:52 AM, Michael Van Canneyt <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
>
>> If you hire 2 painters to paint the whole of your house,
>> and one doesn't paint the inside, "because you don't see it from the outside", of course he will be finished faster; he didn't perform the same work.
>
> Delphi is generating enough information that you can debug using it. 
> The fact that its debugger is built in and FPC requires an external debugger 
> that can't read the .ppus is an implementation detail.

You cannot ignore the implementation details. Making abstraction of these details
means ignoring the benefits that follow from these details:

It is exactly these details that allow FPC to support so many platforms,
and why Delphi is stuck with Windows and remote compiling/debugging for MaCOS.
Delphi does not even run on these platforms ! FPC does.

If you are - like Martin, I suspect - not interested in weird and exotic platforms
then of course FPC's implementation choice and the attached consequences present you 
with a disadvantage because of these 'implementation details'.

But if you are interested in ARM, raspberry PI, MIPS and whatever there is out there,
it is these implementation details that make FPC the only possible choice.

All this said: 
You will not hear me claiming that there is no room for improvement in FPC.
I'm sure there is. However, I do not think we'll be able to match Delphi's 
speed without sacrificing the main goal of FPC: to support as much platforms 
as possible.

So, proposals for improvement are most welcome.

Michael.