[lazarus] Win32 Code Analysis

[Florian Klaempfl]

At 06:26 31.03.01 -0500, you wrote:
>Thank you all for responding to my queries and comments.
>
>If I understand you all correctly then:
>1. fpc uses .pas and is a better compiler then Delphi so no need to change
>to Delphi for development purposes on win32 systems.
>2. lazarus uses .pp for mainly historical reasons, but the people who use it
>think it's nice, and don't feel a need for compiling in Delphi on win32
>systems.
>3. Views are divided on the idea of multiple compilers making compiler
>independant code.

....

>5. Florian thinks that compiling the IDE in Delphi will not be productive
>because of Delphi's buggy compiler.

I think the main point is that every compiler is buggy and if you've
a medium sized project (100000-1000000 lines of code), it's already quite
hard to port it to another compiler because there are a lot
of workarounds to hide bugs of a compiler. Especially if you've
a language like Object Pascal for which no real standard or
test suites exit.


>I think that sums up the discussions, did I miss anything important?

Yes, see below.


>OK, my comments back.
>1. I must have been mistaken in this.
>2. I don't like, but maybe that's just me.
>3. My view is it's better to use multiple compilers to reduce compiler
>dependence. (To me it seems self evident).

...

>5. I'm not so sure, since the current editor was originally written as a
>delphi component, that shouldn't be too much to make compatible again. Also
>the reason I want to be able to develop Lazarus in Delphi was not so much
>because of the editor, but because of the debugger.

I may point out one thing:
- Lazarus isn't only an editor, it's a RAD. And a RAD is very
dependend from the compiler internals, e.g. type information, resources. The
object inspector is depended on the FCL etc..

If you want a debugger, you may try the text mode IDE for win32 till
lazarus is able to debug itself. I thought already a long time ago about
making a description how to compile/debug lazarus with the text mode
IDE, but I didn't find the time yet ...