[fpc-pascal] What to do to get new users

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sun, 1 Dec 2024, Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal wrote:

> On Nov 30, 2024 at 11:54:21 PM, Michael Van Canneyt via fpc-pascal <
> fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
>
>> sorry but it’s not really part of the compiler, just something that
>> generates commands it feeds to the compile right?. aren’t new compilers
>> doing away with this design and integrating the whole setup?
>>
>> No, they are not. I don't know where you got that from.
>> On the contrary, build systems proliferate like crazy.
>>
>
> that was point there is no build system that the compiler system nows about
> so there’s tons of 3rd party ones which break easily.

And the compiler is not supposed to know about it. 
The compiler needs to do exactly thing: compile pascal code.

python, rust, go, nodejs, they also don't know about build systems.

Each of them provides a 'build system' but it is just "make" all over but
written in the language of choice.

Exactly like FPC.

> I always wondered why
> this information just couldn’t be part of the program file itself so
> everything is in one place and the compiler knows about it.

Because you don't know the end-user's installation.
What mac version, what windows version, what linux distro: 
things will be in different places.

The list of possible parameters is endless. You can't put this in in a
single program file. That is why build systems were conceived: to handle
this wide variety of parameters.

> Building in C, C++ and Pascal is always a sore point in my experience.

Then we have very different experiences.

Whenever I meet npm, grunt, gradle, bazel, I know I'm in for a lot of
trouble, conflicting versions, need to update my system, download half of
the repositories on github in N different places etc.

How we got to think that downloading 1200 different packages from internet to build and
install a 200-line javascript program (so basically creating a zip) is OK, 
will forever remain a mystery to me.

Michael.