[fpc-devel] Public access of FPC features and settings

[Florian Klämpfl]

Am 07.03.21 um 12:05 schrieb Alfred via fpc-devel:
> Hello,
> 
> As a follow-up on a Lazarus feature request.
> 
> Among other applications, Lazarus uses some hard-coded list that 
> represent FPC features. Like supported MCU and boards. It would be 
> (much) more convenient to parse the FPC output itself to supply this 
> info. And that could be made easy by using XML as FPC output.
> 
> Besides the above, I would welcome more features to be available through 
> FPC itself.
> FPC uses system files, located in "compiler/systems". With all kinds of 
> settings. Like alignment and calling convention and linker to use.
> FPC uses search-paths. Some user defined through fpc.cfg, some build-in. 
> See all -F... compiler settings.
> It would be nice to be able to get info through FPC itself about these 
> settings and paths.
> As maintainer of fpcupdeluxe, often I need to parse fpc.cfg by hand. Or 
> look into a file like fpmkunit.pp to find the valid FPC targets. Or 
> parse the Makefile to find all available subarchs when building a 
> cross-compiler.
> 
> For a start, I would favor a XML/JSON output of fpc -i. Would be very 
> nice to use its output.

I added a first experimental implementation in r48897. It does not cover 
full -i, so far only to show how it could look like. Any comments?

fpc -ix writes to the console
fpc -ixfpc_info.xml to fpc_info.xml