[lazarus] IDE responsibilities

[Florian Klaempfl]

Jeff Wormsley schrieb:
> 
> On 03/09/2000 at 12:21 PM Curtis White wrote:
> 
> >Is anyone working on how to integrate in the FPC compiler into Lazarus?  The FPC guys sent me some pretty good
> >instructions a long time ago on how to actually include the compiler right into the code, as opposed to
> >shelling out and calling it.  I think we should do it that way, since the compiler is written in FPC itself.
> 
> Wouldn't shelling out to the compiler make it easier to integrate new compilers?  Would the average 
> developer be willing to rebuild Lazarus in order to incorporate a bugfix for FPC?  Also, would it 
> be easier or harder to do cross platform development with an integrated compiler? (I know, that is for later)
> 

This is true, if you want to target multi processors.

But I think the main reason for calling the compiler external is: if the compiler
crashes (hopefully it doesn't very often :)) the IDE won't crash, but using the
fail safe solution is always better.
Further, in the case of an error the compiler doesn't clean up the memory correctly 
(the reasons for this can be found in the history of FPC: early compilers
didn't release any memory because the TP/Delphi heap manager is terribly slow compared
with FPC's one, but FPC was bootstrapped using TP ... ), i.e. you're getting
memory holes if the compiler is integrated. If the compiler is called external the OS cleans
up the memory if the compiler terminates