[fpc-other] Re: inf files and textmode IDE (fwd)

[Tomas Hajny]

On Mon, September 6, 2010 19:14, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> On 6 September 2010 17:58, Tomas Hajny wrote:
>>
>> Neither Lazarus IDE nor MSEide are available under OS/2 and I don't
>> expect
>> that to change any time soon. So if I use an IDE (rather than a
>> standalone
>> editor and command line tools - that is an option I occasionally use too
>> depending on the particular task), it's the textmode IDE.
>
> Ah, a valid point. I forgot about the OS/2 developers. This brings me
> to another question I have been meaning to ask you (seeing that you
> are the only FPC developer under OS/2 I know). Sybil (or WDSybil)
> still runs under OS/2, does it not?  It is open-source, so is it not
> possible to allow Sybil to call FPC instead of the Sybil compiler?
> This should give you an instant "object pascal friendly" IDE to work
> with - hopefully with relatively little effort.

The effort would not be that little, unfortunately. (WD)Sybil class
library is obviously based on (WD)Sybil RTL and that isn't completely
compatible to FPC RTL (for various reasons). Yuri Prokushev tried to
restructure the FPC RTL in order to improve the compatibility few years
ago, but he didn't finish the task and even if he did, it wouldn't be so
nice to have two different sets of RTL units (one based on the standard
FPC structure and the other following the (WD)Sybil structure). Moreover,
(WD)Sybil compiler parameters are completely different from that one of
FPC, of course. Debug information is incompatible, executable format is
incompatible, etc. Quite some work, in fact; possibly more than what would
be necessary to port one of the FPC IDEs to OS/2 (especially if you
consider that (WD)Sybil people are probably not really motivated to move
to FPC and thus not much support could be expected from their side)...


> Alternatively, and something that has been on my mind for a while. I
> was a big fan of OS/2 in the early 90's. I even did promotional work
> for IBM (not that it helped much). Does OS/2 support SDL? I'm seeing a
> gap in the market, and would like to kill two birds with one stone.
> I'm getting a renewed interest in OS/2, and I'm lately rather
> impressed with Haiku as well. I think Haiku supports SDL already. What
> I'm getting at, is writing a new fpGUI backend with SDL, so I can
> target all those "specialized" platforms with a single fpGUI backend -
> similar to what Pixel32 (photo editing software) project did.
 .
 .

Yes, some version of SDL is available and Pavel Kanzelsberger used it when
porting Pixel32 to OS/2. I don't know much about its completeness and
stability, though (but I believe that the person who performed the OS/2
port of SDL was quite supportive in removing any reported bugs).

Tomas