Hello,

I have a question on my mind, a question for each individual developer of Free Pascal Compiler:

Which operating system do you use to develop the compiler ?

One last question in case it's not windows:

Do you have the ability to run windows applications, for example via WINE ? :)

Bye,
Skybuck.

They use several operating systems.

AFAIK Florian uses Windows often, Daniel uses Linux, Michael uses Linux, Marco uses BSD, etc.

You have to have several team members using different operating systems and have at least someone obsessed or focused more on one than the other team member.. other wise the cross platform support isn't as good.

However, I will mention that cross compiling is easier on Unix because you can make Win32 targets from a Unix box easier than you can vice versa. One problem is the Windows file system is not like unix, so things like symlinks and links and what not to .SO files are hard to emulate without you just making exact copies of them instead of links. This was my reason for saying even a unix Mac would be easier to create unix elfs on than a Win32 machine which Marco never understood. It's not just the unix file system though and the file links and symlinks and such things, but the fact that the elf (or whatever binary format you are creating) requires libraries and a bunch of unix related files to exist in the lib search paths, which you have to chase down and find from an existing unix system (but, easier to do on a unix like system since the file system layout can be emulated easier).

The main reason is that dynamic linking goes 100% by name on Windows, not anything file system related.

However, I will mention that cross compiling is easier on Unix because you can make Win32 targets from a Unix box easier than you can vice versa.

No, Windows is an easier cross compile target. Unix is simply not cross compilation friendly. Just try to cross compile from unix to unix or even worse, from a new unix (e.g. Solaris 10) to an older one (e.g. Solaris 9) of the same flavour.

It depends on the vendor. For Mac OS X you have cross compilation SDKs delivered by default, where you' basically pass "-isysroot /Developer/ SDKs/MacOSX10.3.9.sdk" to the linker and that's it.

It's true that it's nice that you don't need the actual dll's to compile stuff for Windows though.

Jonas

etc. meaning Jonas uses Mac, btw. And all the other developers use a wide variety of platforms, so in other words it doesn't matter.

This reminds me of when I forgot to mention only the Porsche 356 when listing every single Porsche model by heart. I was later nearly beat up by a 356 owner.

And Peter uses XYZ, probably unix of some sort.. debian?