[fpc-pascal] Re: Delphi's anonymous functions in Free Pascal

[Jonas Maebe]

On 07 Nov 2011, at 11:28, Martin Schreiber wrote:

> On Monday 07 November 2011 10.55:41 Jonas Maebe wrote:
>> On 07 Nov 2011, at 08:10, Martin Schreiber wrote:
>> One reason is to make it easy for FPC users to reuse existing Delphi
>> code that is out there without having to rewrite it in an "FPC-
>> compatible way".
>>
> Is there a big demand? Examples?

Indy and Synapse are two I know of, but there are probably many more.  
I also used FPC/Lazarus to port an architectural simulator developed  
in our group at the university a long time ago (using Delphi 5 or so)  
to Mac and Linux. I was relatively easy, even though I had no prior  
experience with developing GUI applications in Lazarus (and still  
don't really have, actually, since most things just compiled and  
worked barring some widgetset bugs).

> Maybe if FPC clearly states that it will not follow Delphi blindly

We will not do that. Just like we won't say that we will follow them  
blindly. What happens depends on what code people write, which patches  
are submitted and what the quality and impact of those patches is. A  
lot of Delphi-compatibility features have been added to the compiler  
in the past year simply because Paul Ishenin cares about that and he  
generally writes good code and tests. And non-Delphi compatible  
features such as Objective-Pascal and a JVM backend have been added  
because I cared about that.

> and defines
> what Delphi devels must do to be FPC compatible and to have the free  
> multi
> platform alternative there will be more FPC/Delphi compatible code?

In general that means limiting themselves to features of Delphi  
versions from a couple of years back, and not using Windows-specific  
code.

> Now where Embarcadero uses FPC for iOS development is probably a  
> good moment
> to do so.

I doubt it, because
a) Embarcadero are working on their own ARM compiler and won't ship  
FPC anymore with future Delphi versions
b) all example code posted by FPC contains every single line of  
implementation code between {$ifdef FPC} to make it clear that you may  
have to rewrite that code in the future (although strangely enough  
they use {$mode objfpc} instead of {$mode delphi} everywhere in that  
code)


Jonas