[Info-vax] Free Pascal for VMS ?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 5/7/2018 12:53 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> My primary interest here is not VMS but that would have been a nice bonus.
> 
> I've been looking for alternatives to C which are supported on a wide
> range of targets, including bare metal targets.
> 
> My preferred choice would be Ada but the freely available compiler
> situation with Ada is absolutely horrible when you want to do more
> than desktop Linux or Windows programming.
> 
> It's unclear at this stage how usable Free Pascal is in a bare metal
> environment, but it's clear that it has been designed with support
> for a wide range of environments in mind.

FPC is probably the only Pascal compiler project with a reasonable
strong eco system (which includes the Lazarus IDE).

It and GNAT are probably the only such in the "Pascal family"
as neither Modula-2 nor Oberon have anything widely used.

But it is very much designed to be TP/BP/Delphi compatible. For
good or for worse.

A very large part of the users come from TP/BP/Delphi.

> As such, I am planning to spend some time in the future trying out
> Free Pascal and was curious if anyone had ever looked at porting
> it to VMS.

Getting the compiler to output code for VMS would probably not
be a big problem.

But porting RTL and especially FCL would be major work.

Arne