Hi, On Mon, Jul 11, 2022 at 1:04 PM Ralf Quint <freedos...@gmail.com> wrote: > > GNU's GPC was just a crutch, a unwanted step-child, that didn't even get > a fraction of the attention that it should have gotten early on.
GPC was written in C ... unlike FPC. This was way before GCC 4.8 (2013), when everything switched to C++. I think they had trouble with various backends or maybe also just lack of time for continued maintenance required by GCC upstream. "For the purposes of making releases, however, we will consider primarily C and C++, as those are the languages used by the vast majority of users." (That doesn't mean they're unsympathetic to everything else, just that they clearly focus on C and C++ first.) > That's what resulted in Florian Klämpfl's early Open Source implementation of > FPK (Florian's Pascal Kompiler), which started as a (pretty well made) > i386 generating Turbo Pascal compatible compiler, before following the > path set by Borland/Inprise/Codegear/Embarcadero with their Delphi > implementation of Object Pascal. Unfortunately, there seems to be very > little interest in doing a backport of FreePascal into a 16bit , Turbo > Pascal compatible compiler for DOS. I still sometimes use Oberon/M 1.2 (circa 1991) for DOS. It's somewhat weak (and needs a linker) but works fairly well and supports 8086 (host and target). * http://www.vectorbd.com/bfd/hll/ * http://www.vectorbd.com/bfd/hll/obernm12.zip > The 8086 target version of FPC is still a cross-compiler with demanding > resources which prevent it from > running on (Free)DOS itself. It can run under FreeDOS with Japheth's HX (yes, I've tried 3.2.2). > Which makes me wonder if it would be > possible to do such a "back port" from the sources of one of the earlier > versions of FPK,at least those that started to be self-compiling, before > the more widespread adaptations of Delphi'isms.... :? I highly doubt it. Free Pascal started by using so-called "Go32v1" [sic], aka bits from DJGPP, to be a 32-bit "Turbo" Pascal compiler for DOS. The first public releases were 1995 or so. After 1998 (and 0.99.5), they stopped being "Turbo Pascal only" and started adding in Delphi stuff. The big cleanup and rewrite was 2.0.0 in 2005. I don't think it even worked on DOS again until 2008 (2.2.2, the oldest one still on iBiblio). We're lucky to have it! There's also p2c, and we have an old DJGPP port (circa 1999). Luckily, the output code is (mostly?) 16-bit clean and seems to work well with OpenWatcom. (Technically, you can build p2c itself with OpenWatcom. I whipped up a simple makefile for that: it works!) _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
