Hello,

I have finished with Phase 1 of the Free Pascal Compiler Delphi XE Port Project:

http://www.skybuck.org/FreePascalCompilerDelphiXEPortProject/

All code with porting issue's have been disabled by me.

(The RTL is not used, instead small portions of it where copied to unit_skybuck_types.pas for the time being).

By disabling/commenting all code porting issue's it's now possible to fully compile the free pascal compiler in Delphi XE which should be a great help to programmers all over the world that want to help with this new project !

Programmers should now be able to fix any bug in any file, they can all working in parallel.

This project is open to anybody skilled enough at fixing porting issue's... these are probably/hopefully little issue's like... fixing pascal-array features which are not supported in Delphi. (How to exactly fix these issue's could be further discussed perhaps via e-mail, a forum, newsgroups... not sure yet where we could discuss this... I'll probably setup a nice little forum for us to communicate via the website... )

I also hope that the original developers of free pascal might take a little peak and perhaps help out at fixing their own compiler so it becomes "portable" again.

You should have and/or install a latest version of Delphi... (Delphi XE preferably) that would be great... then you have all the advanced tools that you need to fix this code ! ;) =D

Perhaps your code might even benefit from this. Perhaps it's also easier to navigate to certain things.

Do see SkybuckChanges.txt to see what I did to source code...

I shall also paste a link to the source code right here so you don't have to wrestly through that somewhat whacky/messy website ;):

http://www.skybuck.org/FreePascalCompilerDelphiXEPortProject/fpcbuild-2.4.2-delphi-xe-port-version-002-do-not-use-free-pascal-rtl.rar

Good luck to all and may the force be with you ! ;) =D

Bye,
Skybuck.

Skybuck Flying kirjoitti perjantai, 8. huhtikuuta 2011 12:40:24:

I have finished with Phase 1 of the Free Pascal Compiler Delphi XE Port Project:

Interesting!

You should put your code under a revision control system. It will be more manageable for you and for others.

Good luck to all and may the force be with you ! ;) =D

May the Source be with You ! :-)

Juha

The short story so far:

Hello,

This project is about "porting" the Free Pascal Compiler to Delphi XE.

More information can be found on this little blog:

http://www.skybuck.org/FreePascalCompilerDelphiXEPortProject/

A subversion server has been setup here:

https://free-pascal-compiler-delphi-port.googlecode.com/svn/

The latest release/distribution is here:

http://www.skybuck.org/FreePascalCompilerDelphiXEPortProject/fpcbuild-2.4.2-delphi-xe-port-version-004-make-fixes.rar

The source code compiles, however little sections of code have been disabled as follows:

// *** Skybuck: Fix Needed ***

These sections are slight free pascal language incompatibilities with Delphi and need to be fixed...

There are about 700 of them. (Many duplicates here and there though).

Will you help fixing these issue's ?

If so you can either help by using subversion or simply working via e-mail and selecting a file to fix.

Me e-mail is:

After the compiler is fixed it can be extended to support new hardware/platforms and virtual machines, perhaps even converters... like opencl/cuda/ptx/php/java/.net/c/c++... pretty much anything can become possible afterwards. It's good to have an open-source delphi alternative, if you agree with that then help out and together we rock the cradle ! ;) =D

Bye,
Skybuck.

Ok,

I gave google code a try but it doesn't have all the features I want, so I am switching to sourceforge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/fpcfordelphi/

(I especially like/want the bugtracker ! ;) =D)

Bye,
Skybuck.

Skybuck Flying wrote

This project is about "porting" the Free Pascal Compiler to Delphi XE.

I am curious: What is the use for this?

Google Code has a bug tracker and it is way, way simpler to use/manage than Sourceforge - believe me, I've done both! When the hosting site takes more than 15 minutes to configure, it is wasting my time ;-)

M

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Skybuck Flying wrote: > This project is about "porting" the Free Pascal Compiler to Delphi XE. I am curious: What is the use for this?

This is what Mr Flying does - pops up, attempts to do something without really any good reason. He's not been on an FPC list in a while though. I remember when he was trying to reverse engineer 64bit exe files in.. wow.. 2007? He says a lot, listens a little and generates lots of content with little or no sense. He has been accused of trolling before, but the jury is out on this one...

M

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Skybuck Flying wrote: > This project is about "porting" the Free Pascal Compiler to Delphi XE. I am curious: What is the use for this?

If you Google "Skybuck Flying" you will get an answer to this.

Let's judge him by results. However, I must admit that I'm asking "why" as well: why would one want to recompile a portable free compiler with a non-portable non-free one?

Now if he'd instead devised a way of bootstrapping FPC using GCC I think that everybody would be unreservedly enthusiastic.

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote

On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 4:46 PM, Skybuck Flying wrote: > This project is about "porting" the Free Pascal Compiler to Delphi XE. I am curious: What is the use for this?

The last time (a year or so ago) I played with the compiler code (under Windows), I was surprised to find out that AQTime [ http://smartbear.com/products/development-tools/performance-profiling/ ] didn't support FPC or executables produced by FPC.

So, with this port, you could, for example, use tools such as AQTime or similar to see what's happening when you run the compiler executable (performance profiling) and that may turn out to help optimize the compiler code.

Sent from my iPhone 4

Adem wrote

The last time (a year or so ago) I played with the compiler code (under Windows), I was surprised to find out that AQTime [ http://smartbear.com/products/development-tools/performance-profiling/ ] didn't support FPC or executables produced by FPC.

Last time I used AQTime (circa 2004?) it relied on debug info being present and expected it to be in a Borland/Windows specific format. I'd put it to you that fixing the lack of FPC support for that format would be far more worthwhile in general, with regards to solving this issue. The described venture Mr Flying suggests would only get you as far as the compiler - as Delphi does not use an external assembler/linker (to use with the "new" compiler version) AFAIR and compiling the compiler with Delphi alone will not miraculously change the nature of the compiler's output to be Delphi XE compatible. So, unless I'm mistaken, does zero to help get closer to "general" AQTime compatibility, which would be far more useful in general.

M

Are you saying that you have identified these and inserted about 700 comments or conditional-compilation directives manually? That's a respectable amount of work...

----- Original Message -----

Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote

In this case it would be easier to use an older Delphi commandline compiler, from the time before the Ansi-To-Unicode move, or simply an legacy FPC. You also could try to make the FPC sources compile by gcc

GCC as in GNU Pascal?

Anyway if somebody could take a look at all of this and make some sense of it that would be great/nice, saves me some time and could clear some confusion (?) ;)

Before looking at your code, I'd know the role that your project plays at all. Is it only about making the FPC code compilable by Delphi, as the first stage in the FPC bootstrap?

In this case it would be easier to use an older Delphi commandline compiler, from the time before the Ansi-To-Unicode move, or simply an legacy FPC. You also could try to make the FPC sources compile by gcc - but I'd delay any such attempts to the time, when there doesn't exist any immediately applicable compiler any more.

DoDi

----- Original Message -----

I think that's very wise advice. I'd also throw in that there's a few things in the compiler etc. that I'm interested in looking at, but that I'm trying to build up a sound base of experience actually /using/ it first. The community has put up with me for six years or so, I still consider myself an inexperienced beginner, and I'd be very reluctant to make any suggestion that the developers had overlooked something significant.

In our previous episode, Hans-Peter Diettrich said:

IMHO you'll describing problems he'll never reach. After he gets a Delphi compiled FPC, he still needs to make the resulting product _work_.

If I understood it correctly, this (making the Delphi compiled FPC work stable enough) was the problem with earlier attempts, and the unicode version won't make it any easier.

It could be bugs in Delphi, it could be bugs or assumptions in the FPC code that only surface with Delphi, but either way, this has to be examined, and that is way more difficult then cobbling up a bit of replacement code here and there for places that Delphi can't yet compile.

Okay, so far.

3. Once the RTL is compiled use the original RTL sources and/or RTL binaries to recompile the free pascal compiler so it's fully self-hosting and self-compiling.

This can be accomplished already, without any modifications to the FPC code, by using FPC instead of an Delphi compiler.

The whole idea is to not require FPC to do any development, all development done on/in Delphi IDE and then final stage compile with FPC for non-supported-delphi-platforms.

Development can be done in whatever IDE you like. This is absolutely independent from the compilation and linking of the developed code.

When you want to use FPC as an alternative compiler for Delphi, then you'll have to make it output binaries in a way that the Delphi linker can use. In order to make use of further targets, as already supported by FPC but not by Delphi, you'll have to update the Delphi RTL accordingly, and you must add linkers, debuggers etc. for all these targets. Here the Delphi license gets into the way, so that you'll have to implement a new Delphi-compatible RTL from scratch.

This suggests to me that your approach means much work without any practical use, you better create that RTL first, so that it can be used already in the compilation of FPC itself.

DoDi

That's exactly my impression, as outlined before. It may be easier to start a project from the easy side, but chances are high that it will never reach the goal, when the difficulties increase with every futher step.

DoDi

<snip>

2. Once free pascal compiler is compiled towards an executable by Delphi it should then be possible to compile Free Pascal's own RTL with Free Pascal.

Why? Free Pascal already compiles its own RTL - why do you need to do this? What advantage would there be in tying FreePascal to a Windows only compiler, when it is already cross platform - the RTL already compiling on multiple platforms?

An alternative idea could be to start working on compiling the Free Pascal RTL with Delphi as well.

Why? What advantage would this have? The FreePascal RTL is not radically different from Delphi in many ways, so what advantage would this give? And we are not talking about GUI here at all - we are talking about fundamental types and such. GUI is a completely different subject, as the toolkits API would be built with the basic building blocks for each target.

3. Once the RTL is compiled use the original RTL sources and/or RTL binaries to recompile the free pascal compiler so it's fully self-hosting and self-compiling.

???? It already is. Am I missing something here?

There was a Delphi IDE plug-in that did this - would that just not be, you know, simpler?

GNU Compilers are slow, furthermore they are not object-oriented as far as I know/last time I checked so they totally out-of-the-question.

What does that have to do with anything? The compiler being OO has nothing to do with the capability of the compiler to compile OO code.

Honestly, even the explanation isn't making what you are trying to do make any more sense than it did before you started. So, can you please explain exactly what you are doing - without digressing and assuming we already understand? Because, really, I don't think we really do - at least not all of us ;-)

Earlier attempts seem to have used BDS2006 which was the worst Delphi version ever.

I plan to use Delphi XE which has many bug fixes, thus it's worthy of a new attempt ! ;) =D

We'll see if there are any issues.

So far I am not counting on any issues but if you know of any existing Delphi XE bugs which might be a problem don't hesitate to post an example of such a bug here ;) =D

Otherwise I will assume that everything will go just fine/nicely ! ;) =D

Bye,
Skybuck ;) :)