Did you read this ?

http://www.remobjects.com/product/page.asp?id={E10F7F5C-AE94-4833-9E4B-2EDD5ED69768} ?

RemObjects introduces several really interesting language features with the new version of their Pascal Dialect, which I think would be useful extensions for non .NET compilers, too.

Parallel Programming:
have multiple-CPU systems run code automatically in multiple threads

Property Notifications:
I suppose this allows for attaching multiple handlers to events (but maybe I'm wrong, but multiple handlers is a .NET feature (AFAIK) I suppose it's supported by Oxygene somehow and of course it's useful for non .NET programs, as well)

Nullable Expressions:
Calculations automatically handle a "missing value" bit-combination in a type (in fact not new with Oxygene 3.0 but a feature of Remobj's language since long) (I don't know if that uses .NET support, but of course it can be done natively as well).

Would it be appropriate to take a look at Oxygene and aim for implementing such advanced features in a compatible way. If there are copyright issues, I feel that RemObj will be much more communicative than CodeGear is :). I think that all worlds (native and .NET, "commercial" and "open source") will profit by advanced features and compatibility.

-Michael

Op Wed, 23 Apr 2008, schreef Michael Schnell:

No. There is no point in Chrome compatibility for several reasons, one being Chrome not Pascal compatible, one being we are a native code compiler having no need for .NET features.

New Chrome features are worth a look, but no more than i.e. Ada or C++ features are worth a look.

Daniël

Would it be appropriate to take a look at Oxygene and aim for implementing such advanced features in a compatible way.

This looks just as a minor update to Chrome with features that are all in the CLR.

If we ever get a .NET port, we will surely think about it, but to my knowledge nobody is working on one.

Michael Schnell wrote

Parallel Programming: have multiple-CPU systems run code automatically in multiple threads

This one could be interesting. What does it provide, how does it work? Does it scale well? Etc.

The compiler should be able to detect this ;-).

Micha

New Chrome features are worth a look, but no more than i.e. Ada or C++ features are worth a look.

Of course we don't need features that are tied to .NET.

As I pointed out the features I mentioned (which of course are not the only Chrome features that are not found in FP and/or Delphi), are in fact sensible and doable without .NET indeed worth looking at. And If someone should decide to implement a similar functionality, IMHO it would be a good idea to consider doing it in a compatible way as they supposedly tested the appropriate paradigm for usability.

"Parallel programming", "multiple event handlers" and "missing value handling" _may_ be provided by the .NET framework, but seem very useful to me and of course _can_ be implemented for native code applications as well.

I suppose in the future programmers might even be _expecting_ any programming language to have these features, because compilers based on .NET specifications will provide them as the framework makes them easy to implement.

-Michael

If we ever get a .NET port, we will surely think about it, but to my knowledge nobody is working on one.

Of course right now and in the near future .NET is not supposed to be a target for Free Pascal.

But the features I mentioned are very valuable and I don't see any cause why the could not be implemented in native code.

-Michael