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

Sven Barth pascaldragon at googlemail.com
Fri Mar 1 10:30:19 CET 2013


On 01.03.2013 10:23, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> Sven Barth wrote:
>
>>> An llvm target will move the optimisation burden away from fpc, which
>>> would be very interesting.
>>
>> While we would welcome a LLVM backend it is basically a consent in the
>> development team that this would only be an additional alternative to
>> the normal backends FPC provides.
>
> LLVM's target list doesn't look particularly brilliant compared with
> FPC's :-/

Yes, that's another reason why we wouldn't use it as default :)

> Are there any practical advantages to having both? Could inspecting LLVM
> output help in getting a native code generator off the ground, or does
> it output enough debugging info to suggest novel optimisations?
>

The point is: if we introduce a LLVM backend then why not use it for the 
LLVM supported targets as well. The current (as in "in the last few 
weeks") driving point for a LLVM backend is the possiblity to use 
Emscripten to convert the generated LLVM code to JavaScript and run the 
resulting executable in a browser.
Also if we have a backend independant of FPC we could check whether only 
our backend optimizations are bad (LLVM can generate very optimized 
target assembler code) or whether we should improve our frontend 
optimizations (those that are done on the Abstract Syntax Tree). So the 
introduction of LLVM could be seen as a step closer to better optimized 
code.

Regards,
Sven



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