Hi FreePascal and Firebird people, (Cross-posted to the FPC and Firebird Development mailing lists)
1. Background ============= For the upcoming Firebird 3.0 database server release, developers are working on allowing external languages (at first Java) for writing stored procedures and functions. I found this, rather old, reference: http://web.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=devel&sub=plugins&id=external_java FreePascal (FPC) is an object oriented variant of Pascal that looks very much like Delphi (in fact, there's a Delphi compatibility switch so you can port your existing code). Would it be possible and desirable to have FreePascal as an embedded stored procedure/trigger language in some future release of Firebird? (I can't recall this having been brought up before, so I just start the ball rolling). 2. End user considerations ========================== 2.1 A lot of developers that use Firebird program in Delphi. As FreePascal syntax is (almost) identical, these developers can easily port their code between the database and the application. 2.2 FreePascal may be easier to learn than Java for some people and would make a nice alternative as opposed to e.g. including C or C++ 2.3 FreePascal might not run/is not supported for some platforms that Firebird 3 will be released for. Perhaps HP-UX? Firebird 2.5 runs on Windows (x86/x64), Linux versions (x86/x64), Solaris (Sparc and Intel), HP-UX (PA-Risc) and Mac OSX. 3. Development considerations ======================== I only know enough to make wild guesses... that doesn't stop me from making them, though. 3.1 Obviously, Firebird must allow running compiled code (as opposed to running code in a Java Virtual Machine), presumably in a form of dynamic library. 3.2 Firebird must be modified to include (a stripped down version of?) the FPC compiler (or store the location of the compiler) and call it whenever the FreePascal source code in a procedure is changed. This might not be necessary for production servers as long as embedded Pascal code is compiled on developer machines and the resulting object code is loaded into the production database. 3.3 FreePascal will need to have some way to access, manipulate and return the data in the database and call other Firebird stored procedures, functions, etc. FPC already has good database access, including Interbase/Firebird support, but some kind of interface unit for direct access will need to be added. 3.4 FreePascal will need to use the Firebird memory manager. Using various memory managers is fortunately already possible in FPC. 3.5 Most importantlY: it will probably require a lot of work on both ends to get this done. Fortunately, both Firebird and FPC have an active developer community with good communication and bug tracker systems, so this helps. Your thoughts? -- Regards, JimBeam _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
