[fpc-devel] RTTI interface & variant late binding issue (mORMot)

[Florian Klämpfl]

Am 07.02.2015 um 14:17 schrieb Sven Barth:
> On 07.02.2015 13:54, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Sat, 7 Feb 2015, Jonas Maebe wrote:
>>
>>> On 07/02/15 11:58, Florian Klämpfl wrote:
>>>> Just an idea: What about serializing TCGPara/TCGParalocation?
>>>
>>> The main issue I see with that is that this format changes from time to
>>> time. I'll probably have to change it again to fully support the ppc64le
>>> ABI.
>>
>> Nevertheless, Florian's proposal seems to me like the optimal solution.
>>
>> As far as I can see the compiler just needs to simply write a small
>> block with the needed info in the generated executable. The RTL just
>> needs to match this.
>>
>> That this changes from time to time, I consider much less of a problem.
>> The .ppu files also change regularly, that is just how things are...
>>
>> As soon as a new platform appears you need to wait for libffi etc;
>> the correct version needs to be installed and whatnot. I doubt this will
>> cause less problems.
> 
> Considering that we aren't the fastest to implement new platforms I don't think that this will be
> much of a problem.

Actually, FPC had win64 support before gcc/binutils.

> 
> Looking at their site I noticed however that there are a few platforms that we support that they
> don't. For example m68k-amiga, i8086-msdos, arm-wince and some of the more exotic targets that we
> have (GBA, NDS, Wii for example).
> 
> So in the end a manager approach as Jonas suggested might be the best approach. Then we can for now
> implement the main platforms using libffi and implement full FPC ones one at a time.

As long as we have no realiable approach to prevent people to violate the libffi license, I wouldn't
recommend to do so. Besides this I do not want either that every FPC compiled binary needs to come
with a libffi license text.

> Of course we need to assure that all necessary information can be provided to the manager and if
> that should mean that we'll need to divert from Delphi's RTTI format more then so be it.
>