This is directed at Florian primarily, but any other FPC core member is
welcome to chip in.
Since Florian mentioned that a compiler project is "rocket science" [not
his direct words, but he hinted at that] and totally different to any
other software project... It has really bugged me... Why is it
different, and What is different?
From the recent comments in this mailing list by Sven, Marco and Karoly
I got a bit more insight... mainly things like CI (continuous
integration) and automated builds and test suites, testing on various
platforms etc.
Still, that doesn't make a compiler project that special to me. eg: The
tiOPF project runs automated builds every 3 hours with its test suite.
Those are totally clean builds using the latest source code. Those
builds run under Linux, FreeBSD and Windows. They also have different
combination of options, testing various persistence layers (Zeos+MySQL,
Zeos+Firebird, SqlDB+MySQL, SqlDB+Firebird, SqlDB+PostgreSQL, IBX,
Oracle to name but a few). Even different compilers FPC 2.6.4, FPC 3.0.2
and Delphi 7 (we don't have access no later Delphi versions any more).
Tests alone take between 20-30 minutes to run. All build results are
stored and can later be reviewed. The latest summary results are posted
to a "builds" newsgroup with a URL to a website for a full review of
each test case (1800+ tests) with the exact errors, line numbers etc.
So, what makes a compiler project like FPC different to that?
Regards,
Graeme
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