Michael Van Canneyt schrieb:
... because it increases the maintainance work on fpc. Even with one
front end only we are almost unable to keep the issue count under
control. I'am pretty sure that more front ends will be rejected without
more people working on bug fixing in fpc.
Exactly. We can barely cope as it is. If we compiled C as well, we'd get
bug reports about glibc or whatever C library fails to compile.
I've already translated a couple of available C libraries into Pascal,
using ToPas. There exist only a few constructs that do not translate
into Pascal directly (bitfields...), but their addition to the compiler
(code generators) should not be a problem - in the easiest case they can
be emulated in pure OPL, not affecting the code generators at all. At
statement and procedure level most languages don't differ much, and FPC
even has the C operators already implemented. Since the ToPas C parser
is written in OPL, its adaptation should be easy. This may become my
next project, after the parser...
And, frankly, the project is called "Free Pascal" for a simple reason:
it is a *Pascal* compiler and a *Pascal* project.
Microsoft started with a couple of compilers, until they implemented a
common back-end for all "Visual" languages, and later they invented the
CLR. gcc also allows to add FEs for a certain class of languages, so why
should FPC not become another Free Portable Compiler?
I wonder how somebody can say "it's hard to do", without having even
tried ;-)
DoDi
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