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

[Sven Barth]

Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal <fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> schrieb am
Sa., 19. Okt. 2024, 14:20:

> On Oct 19, 2024 at 3:35:25 PM, Michael Van Canneyt via fpc-pascal <
> fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
>
>> You are not taking the reasoning to its logical conclusion.
>>
>> These "new users" will want to have some standard library - the RTL and
>> packages.
>>
>> So the whole rtl/packages needs to be recreated if you introduce this,
>> for the reasons that were mentioned by Sven.
>> Reasons that were already voiced 20 years ago, by the way.
>>
>>
> Yes all the RTL would need to be redesigned and all the manual frees
> removed. I don’t think it’s THAT difficult honestly to make that work, just
> loads of precious of time.
>

It's an unnecessary maintenance burden, because the current RTL (and
packages) needs to be kept as well for backwards compatibility. Anything
that compromises that will not be accepted, because this is one of *the*
strengths of FPC. As Michael said, we will not maintain two RTLs.

>
This is probably why C++ did smart pointers. Doing those right with Pascal
> is even harder than C++ due the predeclared variables. I’ve played with the
> management operators and they still have problems, most of all is the
> default property which has been discussed for over 5 years with no progress.
>

Smart pointers or more precisely "external reference counting" is the way
to go. And for it to simply work "default properties" or something similar
is not even needed only if we want to reduce typing. And predeclared
variables compared to C++ is also not a problem.

Regards,
Sven
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