[fpc-devel] I've asked this before, but perhaps I wasn't specific enough that time: what do I *personally*, specifically need to do to ensure that a native Windows 64-bit build winds up on the FPC website for the next release?

[Ben Grasset]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 1:25 AM Nikolay Nikolov via fpc-devel <
fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:

> We do care about scientific code as well as fast code, that's why we
> support both the FPU and SSE2+ (as well as AVX, etc.).
>
FPC *chooses *not to generate x87 FPU instructions on 64-bit Windows solely
because "it's deprecated". There's no actual technical limitation in play
for user-mode code as far as the OS support for it goes.

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 1:25 AM Nikolay Nikolov via fpc-devel <
fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:


> Floating point precision bugs, caused by loss of precision are evil,
> because the code works most of the time during testing, but they can still
> cause intermittent faults, which can be catastrophic. Ariane 5 is a notable
> example.
>

I don't disagree with you, but you're missing my point, which is that
there's trivial solutions for this other than mandating the use of an
entirely 32-bit bit toolchain even for the common user who just wants to
use a 64-bit toolchain to generate 64-bit applications on their own 64-bit
operating system.

Simply dropping a 32-bit copy of ppc386.exe into the bin folder of an
otherwise all-64-bit FPC installation is all that's needed be able to build
the 32-bit RTL and packages, and then start building 32-bit programs, for
example.
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