Freepascal online, awesome work!

Freepascal is, with the exception of gcc – the gnu c/c++ compiler toolchain, probably the most versatile and adaptable compiler in the world. Unlike most compilers outside the C camp – Freepascal is complete toolchain, and it has more than a few similarities to c/c++ in that it’s largely self-reliant.

Freepascal scales from the old mc68000 family to the latest Intel i7, impressive!

FPC is easy to port over to new (or old) platforms, and as far as languages go – object pascal has a level of productivity that I have yet to find in other languages.

Now I have no interest in language wars or fanboy stereotyping, all languages have aspects that are unique and beneficial. So this is not an attempt to promote A over B.

Targeting both old and new from a single codebase

While mainstream and work related topics never brush into this – there is actually a healthy group of people still using older platforms. Naturally this is well within the “hobby” range – where passion and curiosity are the prime motivators rather than cash. But still, it is interesting to see how little of modern software is capable of scaling back to processors 10, 15 or 20 years out of date.

Alb42 is the nickname of a very industrious individual who has taken it on himself to port freepascal back to his roots. Which just happens to be the Amiga line of computers.

Some of the best arcade games ever made are “vintage” by nature

But he has also done a lot of work for modern systems. A new Amiga was actually released this year (although most people havent noticed it) – and finding development software for a brand new platform is not easy. You have a variant of C/C++ naturally – but the honest truth is that C/C++ is not the language most people use to create desktop productivity software in. That is left to object pascal, C# and variations of Java. Delphi alone is responsible for a huge portfolio of popular software on Windows for instance. Only surpassed recently by monoliths like C#.

So getting freepascal running on Amiga OS 4 (which is the latest and modern operating system shipping with the new Amiga x5000 model) is very important to the market share of the platform.

Do it online!

Alb42 has setup an online compiler testbed where you can type in your freepascal snippets and compile to executable code on the spot. You can choose between MorphOS, Classic 68k, Aros (x86) and Amiga OS 4 (ppc). It’s a very simple setup yet it’s possible to do ad-hoc compilation and play around with the system 🙂

While humble, Alb42 has setup an interesting online kitchen sink that demonstrates how flexible and powerful object pascal really is

To give it a go, head over to: https://home.alb42.de/fpamiga/

And as always, visit his blog for both VMware images with cross compilation and binaries for your favorite retro system.

But perhaps even more important, your new x5000 (!)

Dont forget to join us at Amiga Dispatch on Facebook.

Cheers!