[fpc-other] What makes a Compiler project (like FPC) special?

[noreply at z505.com]

On 2017-05-25 16:04, marcov at stack.nl wrote:
>>    But Florian's statements just bugged me, and I see no proof to
>>    convince me otherwise - a compiler is just a complex project.
>>    Nothing "special" as he claimed it to be.
> 
> I do think Nikolay's point of it being more interconnected describes it
> fairly well. There are no narrow interfaces that are natural seams for
> modularization inside the compiler.
> 

I've always wanted to modularize the fpc compiler in such a way that you 
could use the fpc compiler for not just compilation, but 
checking/parsing the code for other reasons, i.e. fpdoc.
But this would likely make the compiler slower.

And another modular compiler idea is that you could embed a relational 
database language inside fpc as a plugin, such as SQL or TutorialD, but 
these are just pipe dreams - and a plugin/modular compiler likely will 
be slower to compile code since there are now more things the compiler 
has to choose to do, more wrappers. But, I don't know for certain.

There was also that strange, but rejected, object oriented plugin 
compiler that someone was working on at one time.. Was it Dodi? I forget 
his name. Maybe the delphi decompiler guy?