On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 7:36 PM, twixt@cstone.net wrote:
How is free pascal an improvement over gpc in terms of graphics output?
Do you mean graphics as in generating image files or as in drawing to the screen?
Free Pascal comes with fcl-image, a very powerful library for drawing images:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/fcl-image
It supports 64-bits per-pixel, although that usually goes down when saving as most formats use 24-bits per pixel + 8=bits alpha channel.
For drawing on the screen you can use Lazarus:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Developing_with_Graphics
The best documentation for Lazarus for drawing graphics currently is the Lazarus book, which has 36 pages about LCL images.
http://www.amazon.de/Lazarus-Arbeiten-mit-IDE-Klassenbibliotheken/dp/3936546...
At the moment the book is available only in german language, I am working in the english version.
With Free Pascal you can also use a 3rd party graphics library like Graphics32:
But using LCL graphics with TLazIntfImage is also extremely fast and also supports alpha-blending.
I searched both the programmer's guide and the language reference guide for "graphics." I found nothing.
Usually you should navigate the wiki to find stuff. Graphics are not part of the language or of the compiler, they are provided by libraries.
| And lets face it, here in the states pascal usage has dropped | significantly since the the infestation of java...
That doesn't mean you can't write something like this with Pascal:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Application_Gallery#3D_Image_Comm...