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

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sun, 7 Mar 2021, Florian Klämpfl via fpc-devel wrote:

> 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

Since we write the resource strings in JSON, and XML is meanwhile all but
replaced by JSON, I think it would be much better to write JSON ?

Michael.