Hi John,
If you need some exe/object files, traces, etc. let me know and I will try to supply.
Yes please. If you can give me an x86_64 version of the failing executable I can try examining it to see what is going wrong. Is there any chance that you could provide a test case that only uses object files and libraries ? Ie no Pascal compiler involved, just a set of binary files and the linker command line that combines them (and fails to create a working executable).
The helloworld test case I gave is very easy to reproduce if you install FPC 2.6.4.
I did try to reproduce the problem you described, but unfortunately the system I am using (Fedora 34) only has FPC 3.2.2 available, so I did not get very far.
Reason: Get rid of the linker warning, which was caused by the fact that we used the linker in an unsupported way (and which hence occasionally caused issues).
Hmm, slightly worrying. If the linker is indeed being used in an unsupported way then that is bad. Plus if the remedy is to remove warning messgaes then maybe an important (but unrelated to the original problem) message is being removed.
Because FPC/Lazarus is a giant self-contained software stack, the approximate equivalent of binutils + gcc + libc + an entire graphical windows/component/object system.
OK. I am sure that you already know that problems like this are likely to continue appearing as time goes by, but I will do my best to help.