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

[Florian Klämpfl]

Am 27.09.20 um 18:03 schrieb Martin Frb via fpc-devel:
> On 27/09/2020 09:34, Sven Barth via fpc-devel wrote:
>> Ben Grasset via fpc-devel <fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org 
>> <mailto:fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org>> schrieb am So., 27. Sep. 
>> 2020, 07:50:
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>
>> Yes, there is a reason: you can not build a i8086 or i386 cross 
>> compiler with the Win64 compiler (or any non-x86 compiler to be fair) 
>> due to missing Extended support. Thus the majority of the FPC Core 
>> team considers the Win64 compiler as inferior and also unnecessary 
>> cause the 32-bit one works just as well on that platform.
>>
> Just my 2 cents.
> 
> Well, one the one hand, native 64 bit is only really important if it can 
> do something that 32 bit can not do. (faster, bigger sources, ....).
> 
> On the other hand, not everyone needs a win64 to win32 cross compiler. 
> And if they do, a native 32bit compiler can be renamed and will happily 
> serve as such a cross compiler. (But that is not a must be included / 
> such workarounds may not be wanted, especially since they might cause 
> repeated extra work)
> 
> So the question here is/are imho about the work it takes to amend the 
> release-build process (i.e. update the scripts). And then the amount of 
> extra time needed for each release (build and testing).

The thing is: we would distribute a compiler (the x86_64-win64 one) 
which claims to be able to compile to e.g. to x86_64-linux, but it would 
generate programs which might behave differently than natively compiled 
ones as float constants are handled internally different.