Dear Peter,
(Aplogies for bad send of partial mail earlier.)
I'd like to be certain I know what's on offer here before I think about dipping into my grant to pay for development. My choice is to move to FPC or to help develop GPC. My understanding of the GPC development is as follows. Please correct me.
The GPC development you propose is to re-write the GPC compiler in Pascal. The result will be a compiler that other Pascal programmers, like me, can fix and extend.
The compiler will produce some kind of intermediate representation of the Pascal program. The existing IR is GCC's. Keeping up with changes in the GCC IR definition is time-consuming. You and Frank prefer C++ as the IR. Other options are the LLVM IR.
Advantage of C++ is availability on all platforms, and you and Frank are familiar with C++.
Disadvantage of C++ is compiling C++ IR will can generate its own errors, which will be mysterious to the Pascal user. The debugger will operate upon the code as if it were a C++ source, which will mangle some names and types. In order to work on the compiler, we will have to learn C++.
Yours, Kevan