Hello! ALGLIB project supports FreePascal since January, 2010. I think that it is time to share some interesting results.
Currently ALGLIB includes both Delphi and FreePascal versions of library which allows us to compare popularity of two programming environments. FreePascal version is written in a plain FreePascal dialect. The only two syntactic tweaks used are RESULT variables and GOTO's, which were turned on by the unit-level compiler directives. So ALGLIB for FreePascal can be compiled without passing additional command line parameters to FPC. Compiler quality. I should say that 32-bit FPC 2.4.0 works like an atomic clock. I am routinely testing ALGLIB with many different combinations of optimization/debugging options and it passes all tests, except for the tests which discover ALGLIB bugs :) Situation with 64-bit 2.4.0 is a bit worse - sometimes (1% of cases) FPC crashes during compilation without any visible reason. However, there exists a possibility that this bug is not present in 2.5.* branch, so I think that I should test ALGLIB with newer versions of FPC. Popularity: Delphi vs. FreePascal. Number of Delphi version downloads is about 2.5 times larger than hits count for FreePascal version of ALGLIB. But I think that DOESN'T mean that FreePascal is 2.5 times less popular in scientific community. In my opinion, downloads of Delphi version are mostly downloads by students from developing countries. Delphi is very popular in developing countries because it is (surprise!) cheap - 5$ on a black market. Compare it with about 2000$ at CodeGear's website. However, there is a steady fraction of users who prefer to work with FPC - which makes me happy. Now about the future. As I told, I think that I should use FPC 2.5.* for unit-testing because one important floating point bug was fixed only in 2.5.1 However, 2.5.* is in development and I'm not sure what version it is better to use - last daily snapshot or something else. Can anyone from FPC team point tell me which 2.5.* release is the most stable? -- With best regards,, Sergey mailto:[email protected] _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - [email protected] http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
