johanblok@ix.nl wrote:
On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, Geoff Bagley wrote:
Can someone please clarify the "parentage" of the Pascals (plural) available under Linux.
There seem to be two distinct ones. There is gpc, the subject of this list, and a seemingly distinct route via p2c and the gcc "C" compiler.
Am I confused ? Are they really separate, and why (if true) are there two rival Pascals. How do they differ ? Are they both Gnu ?
I don't know about p2c.
But there's is a third, completely separate one: FPC http://www.freepascal.org
In general FPC has better compatibility with Turbo Pascal. I know FPC has a good graph implementation.
In general FPC is more stable (if you use version 1.04/1.05) than gpc, and development on it is very heavy.
FPC is also a lot faster,
faster for what ? For compilation time I agree, for execution time it is typically 30 to 80 % slower (for djgpp and mingw32 implementations I am able to check). And of course these difference are not unrelated.
but not available on all unix systems, as gpc
is. But FPC has almost all features of Delphi, there's even a project called Lazarus developing a VCL like library and IDE.
Johan