[fpc-pascal] Object pascal language compatiblity - was: Does FPC 2.8.0 can actually still be called Pascal ?

[Simon Kissel]

>> This is a terrible idea. The business advantage of Object Pascal
>> has always been the component market, as it reduces development
>
> Component vendors simply aren't interested in FPC, and those that are,
> are bought about by EMBT and made Delphi only.

Component vendors are interested in selling components.

The honest loyality of component vendors to 
Borland/CodeGear/DevCo/Embarcadero is next to non-existant. The reason 
Delphi is the focus
is that they invested into that, and that Embarcadero is using
anti-competitive tactics.

I've been a Borland Technology Partner. Besides my personal experience,
I sure know how component vendors are treated.

Supporting FPC just has be to be attractive enough so that the
component vendors are willing to take the risk of not getting
any more "love" from Embarcadero.

Removing technical obstacles therefore helps. Language compatibility
is something that helps a lot.

>> We ourselves have to stick with D7 language level because we still
>> need CrossKylix for our Linux builds because the FPC compiled code
>> is prohibitively slower than Kylix' one.
>
> I stumbled across this last week too. On the same OS, I compiled the
> exact same unit testing test suite using FPC 2.6.0 and Delphi 7. Running
> those tests, again on the same system, the Delphi executable completes
> the 180 tests in 2 seconds. The FPC binary took 18 seconds for the same
> 180 tests!!!

 From our measures the Delphi and Kylix compilers in most cases
on x86 produces code that is about in the order of 50% faster than FPC. 
So probably there is some issue specific to your test suite that is 
triggering this huge difference, it should not be that big. For some
applications (like ours), still the difference is too big, so we only
use FPC on platforms where there is no compiler from Embarcadero, and
keep all of our source code compatible to Delphi 7 + Kylix + FPC. 
Language compatibility enables us to have a choice. Without this choice,
we would have needed to move to a different programming language.
Choice is good, competition is good, compatibility amongst competitors
is good.

Cheers,

Simon