It's been some years since GPC failed to compile on macOS. Is there any hope that someone knowledgeable will get this going again or is Pascal a dead language that we best abandon? Tom Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D. Senior Investigator National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute Center for Cancer Research RNA Biology Laboratory Biological Information Theory Group Frederick, Maryland 21702-1201 schneidt@mail.nih.gov https://alum.mit.edu/www/toms
No open source project can ever die while there are people willing and able to either work on it themselves, or pay somebody to work on it for them. If you have a large investment in Pascal code, abandoning it will cost you time, effort and lost opportunities. You might like to consider putting a dollar value to that cost and paying a developer to fix GPC on Mac OS. (Not me: I don't have a Mac and don't know enough about the GPC internals to have any hope of doing the work myself.) Otherwise, there's always hope that some fan of Pascal on the Mac will get it working again, some day. But hope alone may not be sufficient. Good luck! -- Steven
Hi Tom, Your situation sounds somewhat familiar, and you may be interested to know what we decided to do. The company SARC has been using Extended Pascal since the â80s, with currently roughly half a million LOC in production. We have been using Prospero Extended Pascal, a compiler that has disappeared from the market a decade ago. Migrating to gpc would have been an option technically, but strategically not sustainable due to weak vital signs. Therefore we decided to port all of our code to either Free Pascal, Ada or D. You can read about the selection process here[1]. I ended up developing a transcompiler to help automating the conversion of our Pascal code to D[2]. The status of that project is that we currently have some 40+ modules translated and test programs are running. Have a look at the video of my report at DConf last month[3]. I am not sure whether porting your code is worthwhile, you may be best off with installing a virtual machine on your Mac with an OS where gpc is still working, and run your software off of that. But there is no question in my mind that porting is the only option if a long productive future is important. You may be able to leverage much of the work that we have done, but it certainly is not a one-click solution. The syntax of D is different from Pascal, it is more like C. But unlike C, D shares many of the traits of Pascal, like array bounds checking and nested functions. The language is powerful and versatile. The D community is not large but active. D is used in bioinformatics already[4,5]. Let me know if you want to know more. Bastiaan. [1] https://dlang.org/blog/2018/06/20/how-an-engineering-company-chose-to-migrat... [2] https://dlang.org/ [3] https://youtu.be/HvunD0ZJqiA [4] https://youtu.be/Nf6a8Fd7STY [5] https://wiki.dlang.org/Bioinformatics_Libraries Bastiaan Veelo, PhD SARC B.V. www.sarc.nl Brinklaan 109 A II 1404 GA Bussum, Netherlands Phone: +31(0)85 0409040 Phone direct: +31(0)85 0409051
Thomas Schneider wrote:
It's been some years since GPC failed to compile on macOS. Is there any hope that someone knowledgeable will get this going again or is Pascal a dead language that we best abandon?
I am affraid that GPC on Mac is dead. Open source projects live when there are people wanting to work on them. For me GPC works on Linux. More precisely, after litte tweaks GPC works on my Linux. OTOH I have only little use of it, most of my coding is in different languages. So I have limited motivation to improve it. Most of work on Mac port was done by Adriaan van Os -- it looks that he moved to other things. -- Waldek Hebisch
I hope it's revivable, as I very much like GPC and think there needs to be an open source implementation of Extended Pascal. I'm currently looking for work and have two other open source projects to worry about (one of which uses GPC), but once I am again employed full time, I would very much like to dig into the code and see what can I can do with it. I confess to having a vested interest in GPC because it's the only Pascal compiler I know of that compiles my recently revived Pascal project SAV ( https://github.com/jlries61/SAV). John L. Ries 909 S. Main St. Cedar City, UT 84720 (435) 867-8885 On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 5:11 AM Bastiaan Veelo <Bastiaan@veelo.net> wrote:
Hi Tom,
Your situation sounds somewhat familiar, and you may be interested to know what we decided to do. The company SARC has been using Extended Pascal since the ’80s, with currently roughly half a million LOC in production. We have been using Prospero Extended Pascal, a compiler that has disappeared from the market a decade ago. Migrating to gpc would have been an option technically, but strategically not sustainable due to weak vital signs. Therefore we decided to port all of our code to either Free Pascal, Ada or D. You can read about the selection process here[1]. I ended up developing a transcompiler to help automating the conversion of our Pascal code to D[2]. The status of that project is that we currently have some 40+ modules translated and test programs are running. Have a look at the video of my report at DConf last month[3].
I am not sure whether porting your code is worthwhile, you may be best off with installing a virtual machine on your Mac with an OS where gpc is still working, and run your software off of that. But there is no question in my mind that porting is the only option if a long productive future is important. You may be able to leverage much of the work that we have done, but it certainly is not a one-click solution.
The syntax of D is different from Pascal, it is more like C. But unlike C, D shares many of the traits of Pascal, like array bounds checking and nested functions. The language is powerful and versatile. The D community is not large but active. D is used in bioinformatics already[4,5].
Let me know if you want to know more.
Bastiaan.
[1] https://dlang.org/blog/2018/06/20/how-an-engineering-company-chose-to-migrat... [2] https://dlang.org/ [3] https://youtu.be/HvunD0ZJqiA [4] https://youtu.be/Nf6a8Fd7STY [5] https://wiki.dlang.org/Bioinformatics_Libraries
Bastiaan Veelo, PhD
SARC B.V. www.sarc.nl Brinklaan 109 A II 1404 GA Bussum, Netherlands Phone: +31(0)85 0409040 Phone direct: +31(0)85 0409051
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I don’t know if Adriaan van Os still intends to invest some time, but he wanted to do that, see: http://www.g-n-u.de/pipermail/gpc/2016-December/015467.html maybe you should try to contact him directly. -- Bernhard From: Gpc [mailto:gpc-bounces@gnu.de] On Behalf Of John Ries Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2019 1:08 AM To: gpc@gnu.de Subject: Re: Is GPC dead? I hope it's revivable, as I very much like GPC and think there needs to be an open source implementation of Extended Pascal. I'm currently looking for work and have two other open source projects to worry about (one of which uses GPC), but once I am again employed full time, I would very much like to dig into the code and see what can I can do with it. I confess to having a vested interest in GPC because it's the only Pascal compiler I know of that compiles my recently revived Pascal project SAV (https://github.com/jlries61/SAV). John L. Ries 909 S. Main St. Cedar City, UT 84720 (435) 867-8885 On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 5:11 AM Bastiaan Veelo <Bastiaan@veelo.net<mailto:Bastiaan@veelo.net>> wrote: Hi Tom, Your situation sounds somewhat familiar, and you may be interested to know what we decided to do. The company SARC has been using Extended Pascal since the ’80s, with currently roughly half a million LOC in production. We have been using Prospero Extended Pascal, a compiler that has disappeared from the market a decade ago. Migrating to gpc would have been an option technically, but strategically not sustainable due to weak vital signs. Therefore we decided to port all of our code to either Free Pascal, Ada or D. You can read about the selection process here[1]. I ended up developing a transcompiler to help automating the conversion of our Pascal code to D[2]. The status of that project is that we currently have some 40+ modules translated and test programs are running. Have a look at the video of my report at DConf last month[3]. I am not sure whether porting your code is worthwhile, you may be best off with installing a virtual machine on your Mac with an OS where gpc is still working, and run your software off of that. But there is no question in my mind that porting is the only option if a long productive future is important. You may be able to leverage much of the work that we have done, but it certainly is not a one-click solution. The syntax of D is different from Pascal, it is more like C. But unlike C, D shares many of the traits of Pascal, like array bounds checking and nested functions. The language is powerful and versatile. The D community is not large but active. D is used in bioinformatics already[4,5]. Let me know if you want to know more. Bastiaan. [1] https://dlang.org/blog/2018/06/20/how-an-engineering-company-chose-to-migrat... [2] https://dlang.org/ [3] https://youtu.be/HvunD0ZJqiA [4] https://youtu.be/Nf6a8Fd7STY [5] https://wiki.dlang.org/Bioinformatics_Libraries Bastiaan Veelo, PhD SARC B.V. www.sarc.nl<http://www.sarc.nl> Brinklaan 109 A II 1404 GA Bussum, Netherlands Phone: +31(0)85 0409040 Phone direct: +31(0)85 0409051 _______________________________________________ Gpc mailing list Gpc@gnu.de<mailto:Gpc@gnu.de> https://www.g-n-u.de/mailman/listinfo/gpc
participants (6)
-
Bastiaan Veelo -
John Ries -
Steven D'Aprano -
Thomas Schneider -
Treutwein Bernhard -
Waldek Hebisch