[fpc-pascal] Freepascal on Mac

[Jonas Maebe]

On 23 okt 2004, at 15:38, Aleksey Vaneev wrote:

>   The question is: will moving to Freepascal permit me to compile my
>   programs for Macintosh platform without severe hassle?

I don't know. That depends on whether you have a lot of endian-specific 
code, whether you use much Windows-specific functionality, whether you 
rely on the 80bit precision offered by the extended type on 80x86, etc.

>   Has FP's Mac
>   support proved to be commercially stable?

I know of one person who's moving to Free Pascal for his Mac shareware 
programs. There may be more. I don't think there are already any large 
scale deployments of FPC-compiled programs on the Mac.

>   My goal is to be able to have the same program I have for Win32
>   compile and run for Mac just by switching compiler's target.

Even if something like that would ever be possible, note that such a 
program will have little if any success in the Mac market. Windows 
programs use completely different interface paradigms and conventions, 
which means they work entirely unlike one would expect on the Mac (just 
one simple example: on the Mac, almost no settings dialog box has an 
"apply" button; settings are generally applied immediately as you 
change them, unless they could have disruptive effects).

Even Java programs have to be polished for each platform they are 
deployed on.


Jonas