Quo vadis, GPC?

[Pascal Viandier]

On 10-07-26 06:16 PM, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
>
> I don't really know how many of you currently use GPC, and to what
> extent and in which ways, e.g., do you use it just to maintain some
> legacy code, or are you actively writing new applications?
>
<snip>

Dear Mr Heckenbach,

I spent 3 years converting our legacy Pascal applications from SUN Pascal to GNU 
Pascal under Sparc Solaris.
Many big programs, in fact, with a mixture of Pascal, C, C++, ESQL, 4GL, name it...
The conversion was an adventure, mostly because the SUN Pascal compiler had 
digested bugs in our code for years without detecting them.
By using GPC, we found approximately 350 bugs at compile time and more than 450 
runtime errors that were never seen before.
The result is we produced the most reliable release ever of our programs.

So, maybe what is under the hood of GPC is not as clean as it could (As you 
mention in your article), but GPC is the best Pascal compiler I ever used,
And your support for it has been five stars quality.

The conversion project finished a year ago and I must say it has been a great 
success - and a lifesaver for our company since SUN stopped its Pascal 
compiler's support in year 2000.

Then our biggest customer asked: "What about running your applications under Linux?"
Since GPC is multiplatform the adventure restarted but, this time, it took only 
2 months to have all our apllications running under Linux.
And the biggest part of the job was in the C/C++ code!

I cannot see any Pascal compiler other than GPC that had permited this.

By the way, we still develop in Pascal - though partially - so we may be 
interested in new features.
The choice of the new GPC to be written in Pascal or to be a C++ translator does 
not matter for us as long as it stays as strong and portable as it is now - and 
stays compatible with the current one.

Again many thanks for this great job, Frank.

Pascal Viandier


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