[fpc-devel] Another thread about the fact that official FPC releases are *unnecessarily* non-representative of the platforms it actually runs on

[Ben Grasset]

Was browsing on the FPC wiki (that is, the actual wikipedia.com entry for
FPC) today, and came across an edit someone had made in the "3.2.0" section
that said the following:

"FreePascal cannot be installed on macOS Catalina, and no known workaround
exists."

It then linked to an open issue on the FPCUpDeluxe github repository,
suggesting that perhaps whoever made that edit literally thought
FPCUpDeluxe was the *only* reasonable way to get FPC.

They're partially right, and partially wrong, IMO. FPCUpDeluxe is an
excellent tool that as far I'm concerned should be linked front-page on
both the FPC and Lazarus official websites, because it frankly blows the
"download archives from sourceforge" method of obtaining FPC out of the
water, in general.

With that said, there's also the elephant in the room that is the fact that
Lazarus happily provides builds of FPC with it's releases that typically
are "exactly what you want" for the platform in questions, which in many
cases are *not* also provided as standalone FPC installer / archive
downloads.

For example, to this day there is *still* no natively-64-bit Windows
download for FPC, for absolutely no reason. You instead either get silently
linked to the 32-to-64-bit cross compiler on Sourceforge, or linked to
pages that *explicitly* provide straight-up misinformation in saying "There
is no native compiler available for x86_64 Win64. You have to use a cross
compiler".

That last quote is absolute BS, to be very frank. There is no reason
whatsoever not to use a natively-64-bit copy of FPC if running a
natively-64-bit copy of Windows, and there hasn't been for well over half a
decade at this point.

I've brought this up on this exact mailing list before, and was met with
attitudes that seemed to suggest people for some unknown reason think
"Linux x64 good and normal, Windows x64 bad, not normal, and unstable!".

Is there a specific person I need to convince that 64-bit releases on ALL
relevant platforms (Windows, Mac OSX, etc) are in fact incredibly
essential? I've got a long, long, long list of "here's why you're wrong"
talking points to provide to anyone who actually thinks I should be using
the 32-to-64-bit cross compiler on Windows 10 x64.

Lastly, it isn't even like this amounts to more work for anyone: Lazarus
provides a native Win64 build of FPC along with the native Win64 build of
it. I don't understand why that same build is not also provided as a
standalone FPC release.

Further, the FPC releases for Mac are still listed as being explicitly
"Intel x86/i386" on the download page on the FPC website, despite the fact
that AFAIK the image is for both 32-bit and 64-bit OSX.

That platform specifically is where it REALLY needs to be made clear that
FPC fully supports 64-bit applications on the latest version of the OS,
considering that 32-bit applications are actively deprecated as far as
Apple is concerned.
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