[fpc-pascal] CrossFPC is finally released

[Simon Kissel]

[Excuse the broken thread reference, I just subscribed to this list]

We've just released the first public version at www.crossfpc.com. Go
check it out. So yes, we kept the "late 2012" release date ;)

Bero indeed is the co-author of this project and he's a brilliant mind.
Sadly his code typically is undocumented and a visual mess. That's
part of the reason it took 7 years for this to be turned into a public
project instead of an internal one only - a hell lot of clean up work
had to be done, and there still is much more to do.

Marco: LTNS. Well, remote debugging is there, but at this point without
any documentation. No visual designer however, we've kicked out the
old CLX-based stuff we once had in it a long time ago. In case there
is demand (and time) we might add one or more visual toolkits in the
future - but for us personally, this is not a focus. I use CrossFPC
commercially for embedded projects where all GUIs are web-based
(typically ExtJS these days), and Bero uses the project for all kind
of weird things (including Android games).

However, it's not just that we've "dumped what we had", this is not
a one-shot thing. We are using it daily for years, and will keep doing
so. In the background you probably have seen various activity and
FPC improvements from Nico Erfurth on the ARM stuff, who is a developer
at my Viprinet company, and we intend to keep investing into this as we 
really need better code generation for ARM.

In regards of CrossFPC it's just a matter of moving from a non-public 
release process to a public one. Therefore CrossFPC can be considered an 
active project. Yes, it's only serving a small niche, and maybe that 
niche even one day will be obsoleted by Embarcadero's mobile studio, or
maybe not.

Cheers,

Simon