[fpc-pascal]Free Pascal - general commet / suggestions

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, Paschal Mushubi wrote:

> Hi
> I have been looking for a language to replace my reliance on C++
> and FP seems like it could fit the bill but I have a few questions for
> you veterans.
> I develop in C++ not because I love it, am not even that good at it, but
> because I can find free easy to use
> libraries to accomplish a lot of what I need to do which is usually
> developing Oracle database apps.
> Unfortunately I can't find the libraries (units) I am looking for. Has
> someone tried to mimic the STL for example?
> If I knew FP well I could write a unit that does this
> http://otl.sourceforge.net/otl3.htm#toc for example.
> or develop a generic database access layer like Perl DBI. Shouldn't
> effort be put in developing Internet aware libraries targeting the web
> instead of the traditional desktop? Any Internet site developed in FPC.
> That wouldn't be a bad advertisement.

Such things exist already. The 'DBI' exists and is called TDataset,
after Delphi's database handling classes.

Concerning CGI, the FCL contains the 'cgiapplication' class;
it provides most of what you need to develop a CGI application.

The FPC team has a test suite which is run daily, with results
stored in MySQL. A CGI application displaying the results of
the tests is written with the cgiapp class. You can check out the
sources in CVS. (projects/testsuite)

The contributed units and bug reporting stuff are also scheduled for
rewriting in FPC (currently they're in PHP).

> I have browsed the site http://www.freepascal.org but I get the
> impression that a lot is going on that is not well directed effort in my
> opinion. Do you really need to support all these platforms?

Yes, this is the advantage of FPC over e.g. Delphi.

> Including
> DOS for God's sake. Looks like everyone and their brother is trying to
> develop yet another IDE.

The Lazarus team is doing a great job. I would say that this is the
editor of choice for FPC if you work on Linux.

If you feel like helping, you may consider writing a TDataset descendent
for Oracle. The C bindings are somewhere in the packages.

Michael.