FreePascal experience

Tried FPC 2.4.4 recently, what I must say, Lazarus and console fpide are unusable under Ubuntu 11.10 and MacOSX -- crash all the time, no debugger support and strange GUI bugs, although I have not tried them under Windows.

However, the big POSITIVE side is that the compiler (FPC) is a lightning fast one and easy to install at any platform. It's even faster than javac. I'm really impressed. And GDB understands well pascal programs, tried to debug and it's amazingly feature rich. The language is plain simple and you can easily program in any decent text editor. I really enjoyed playing around with it. The generated applications are lightweight like in good old times, native, fast, not so hungry for memory and cpu resources. Also FPCMAKE is a good tool if you plan to develop a more or less complex application.

FPDOC tool is not what I like to use (it requires documentation not in the source comments but in a separate xml file), better to pick pasdoc (http://pasdoc.sipsolutions.net/) for those who used to javadoc and doxygen.


As for the Pascal programs I've used -- they are not pretty stable, I think it's the fault of the poor memory management strategy applied. It's better to use reference-counting techniques like in GNUstep/Cocoa than TComponent's sole ownership and dangling pointers.

Playing with the compiler I have tried to implement a base class to do that counting and one more to track weak references. It was a success, so it's not the language fault but the programmers who use it, because my solution looks good and I plan to publish a library on GitHub if I ever program in FP.

One more deficiency is the lack of Unicode strings support in OS calls, e.g. for file names on Windows. Although it's no problem under Linux and/or MacOSX.

Generally FPC is a great tool, and there are a lot of useful libraries to make life easy.

jEdit performance workaround

Runs slow on my Ubuntu, but if I make

jEdit global options -> Appearance -> Show the systray icon to OFF.

it runs as fast as native. Strange bug on Gnome 3.

D language status, LDC2

https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/State_of_LDC_148791.html

FreePascal status

Unicode is supported by LCL (Lazarus) via UTF-8. There are several functions to convert from system encoding strings (codepage on Windows) to utf-8 strings.

http://wiki.freepascal.org/LCL_Unicode_Support

According to the docs, fpc supports MacOSX 32 and 64-bit, iOS targets.http://wiki.freepascal.org/LCL_Unicode_Support

Digitalmars D version 2 a fresh look

A few years ago I spotted the D language and was quite impressed by it, although the division of standard library, the development of a new 2.0 version and the stale state of many libraries stopped from active usage of it.

Now a lot of things changed, the 2.0 version is more or less stable and there's a GNU D compiler for this version and it's actively developed/supported, and even planned to be maintained as one of the GNU Compiler Collection. I wish it come true.

Having reviewed the specs for the D 2.0 I should admit that the language is engineered VERY thoroughly, with many features I was missing in Java and C++, it's clean and rich at the same time.

At first I was planning to use LDC compiler for D 1.0 because failed to compile GDC for MacOSX, but then I decided to start coding something useful for Linux only to study the language, and probably later there will be a viable implementation for MacOSX. The official implementation (DMD) can compile only 32-bit binaries for MacOSX, that's why I'm concerned on alternative implementations like GDC, LDC2...

Here's the link to the site:

http://www.d-programming-language.org
http://www.digitalmars.com

LDC under ubuntu 11.10 one more try

Installed through apt llvm-2.9, downloaded trunk LDC, executed ccmake, and added -ldl to LIBCONFIG_LDFLAGS. Successfully built!

Build tango, and adjusted /usr/local/etc/ldc.conf:

// This configuration file uses libconfig.
// See http://www.hyperrealm.com/libconfig/ for syntax details.

// Special macros:
// %%ldcbinarypath%%
//  - is replaced with the path to the directory holding the ldc executable

// The default group is required
default:
{
    // 'switches' holds array of string that are appends to the command line
    // arguments before they are parsed.
    switches = [
        "-I/usr/local/include/d",
        "-I/usr/local/include/d/tango/core/vendor",
        "-L-L/usr/local/lib",
        "-L-ltango-ldc",
        "-d-version=Tango",
        "-defaultlib=tango-ldc",
        "-debuglib=tango-ldc"
    ];
};

LDC under Ubuntu 11.10

Install llvm 2.9 from repo, ccmake, specify path to llvm-config tool: /usr/lib/llvm-2.9/bin/llvm-config, finally was unable to build from sources. :(