[fpc-pascal] Re: Support for C++ library format?

[Jonas Maebe]

On 06 Oct 2009, at 13:28, Juha Manninen wrote:

> I liked the design of .NET, yes. However, I think compiling CIL to  
> machine
> code is not the same thing as with real compiled languages.

It can be.

> At least my experience is that any program run under .NET or Mono  
> starts
> slowly and hogs memory. In that respect it is comparable to Java.

You can use .NET in two ways: as a virtual environment similar to Java  
(in which case you use Mono), or simply as an intermediate bytecode  
format which is later on compiled to machine code (similar to LLVM --  
which you also can use in a virtual environment, for that matter). In  
the latter case, there is no overhead at all (or there doesn't have to  
be any, at least).

E.g., STMicroelectronics is using this for their embedded systems  
using GCC4Net: http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cli.html . That's both a  
frontend (compiling GCC-supported languages into CIL -- note that C++  
is not yet fully supported at this time) and a backend (compiling CIL  
into machine code for any CPU supported by GCC).

> The main strength of Object Pascal (and FPC) is that it is compiled.  
> I see it
> as the only justification for the whole language. Otherwise we could  
> just dump
> it and start using C# or Java or something which have cleaner syntax  
> without
> carrying historical (pointer) syntax.

If that's the only reason why you use Object Pascal, you can probably  
start using C# instead without any problems.


Jonas