[Lazarus] Parser

[Marco van de Voort]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 11:59:15PM +0300, Adem wrote:
> >> Why do you think Pascal would lose its glamor when (or if) FPC can  
> >> compile other languages?
> > ... because it increases the maintainance work on fpc. Even with one front end only we are almost unable to keep the issue count under control. I'am pretty sure that more front ends will be rejected without more people working on bug fixing in fpc.
> My assumption was this: Anyone who's going to add such capabilities 
> would do it in a way that he/she/they would make sure there's enough of 
> momentum/community to undertake not only the maintenance of their own 
> (different lang compilation or whatever) contribution, but also help 
> with relevant issue count in FPC.
> 
> IOW, this sort of thing should be a precondition to such contributions. 
> Keeping the door ajar (or, at least, not closed) for this sort of thing 
> would be --IMHO-- a good thing as it is likely to bring on (more) 
> commercial (and, hence/hopefully more stable) interest to the FPC flora 
> and fauna.

It is a devilish dillemma. 

Being lax, and you become dumping ground for failed experiments of people
that lose interest, and the main project will suffer. We already have a
packages/ dir to prove this for the other libraries.

The only workable solution, require a stable group to form is several years
minimum might seem overly crude.

On the other hand, the compiler is much more stable nowadays, and even a
branch of a major version doesn't initiate a lot of rewrites of code (like
it used to). 

A fork for a while might be doable, and it wouldn't brake the new team with
constant stability and compatibility requirements etc.

> Frankly, I am not terribly fixated on getting 'commercial interest', but 
> I am old enough to know that 'love' alone isn't always enough to 
> guarantee continuity.

Not wanting to plunge the project into a chaotic rewrite has nothing to do
with commercial interests. If there are reasonable doubts about the success
of this attempt, it is only logical that Core doesn't want to upset the
project for a long time. And then there is the issue of possible speed degradation.

> >> I would have thought it would be just the opposite:
> >>
> >> If you could compile, say, Modula (or C/C++) with FPC, you would have direct access to a huge&  time-tested resource of libraries etc which you could directly incorporate into your applications,
> > This can be done already using compilers supporting these languages
> True. But, wouln't it be nice if people could use, say, libc (as 
> recently mentioned in FPC list) in FPC too?

I think these "pie in the sky" kind of scenarios are several years if not
longer beyond the initial C compiler.  It will be a plant that needs a lot
of nurturing and care for a very long term, before it becomes an
alternative, and faces stiff competition.  And there is another problem that
the "pie in the sky" scenarios seem to be the main reasons for the compiler,
so it will require quite a pigheaded team.

If these rosy C helps Pascal interoperability scenarios are possible at all.
Kylix uses Pascal bindings to libc, despite Borland having a (compatible!)
C/C++ compiler.  And C++ compatible Delphi code is stuffed top till bottom
with {$externalsym xx} and similar helper commands.