About this year … 2015

Posted by ALB42 on 31. Dezember 2015One Comment

This year freepascal got a big advance on many levels, in general with the freepascal 3.0 and for the Amiga-style systems also. Even more advances on the LCL/Lazarus topic on Amiga, AROS and MorphOS.

 

It began in 2014 already, when I restarted the MUI LCL implementation for AROS. Begin of 2015 I cared more about some applications to test the implementation especially the owner drawn things. So I wrote ColorIt and FPCMines for AROS and tried to write or port some little apps and some more.

 

A milestone reached in march 2015 when I got the SynEdit component to work. The little test program I used to play around with the needed changes in LCL grew on requests from the AROS community to a full usable Editor, which got the name Edisyn. By improving the editor many additional features are included into LCL, like key events, advanced mouse events, tabs, scrollbars, colors and much more.

 

With all this improvements I felt ready to give the lazarus ide another try and finally at least it starts. So we are on a good way to bring lazarus natively to work on AROS.

 

But how about the other platforms (AmigaOS and MorphOS)? I did already some changes in the code with the other platforms in mind. When the resource support was enabled in freepascal I took the opportunity to try to port the LCL for MorphOS and m68k AmigaOS. Which somewhat worked but not in the same way as in AROS especially the layout did not work and the program always crashed on the end. But it gave me much insight how MUI is working also for AROS Zune which is a little bit more error tolerant than the original MUI.

 

Also on the freepascal front some new things appeared, the support for x86_64 AROS was included, but sadly because of the ABI difference the port is still not finish and unusable. I’m waiting for the ABI switching feature in freepascal. The implementation is done just I need the decision to do it in the proposed way.

 

In October I did something unusual for me, I did C coding for AROS, trying to code a dynamic Amiga-style Library (in this case sql) to use it in freepascal AROS. But later I found out this wrapper library is not needed and I can directly use the C linklibs as they are.

 

At the end of the year I took more work again on the MorphOS and m68k Amiga LCL and finally got it to work. So the first LCL programs can be compiled for MorphOS and m68k Amiga.

 

What 2016 will bring

I hope I can join the two LCL implementations (AROS on the one side and MorphOS and Amiga on the other) together again. Bring the MorphOS port to the same level as AROS, that maybe Edisyn will work. The next logical step would be to continue on lazarus ide and try to make it somewhat usable.

One comment to "About this year … 2015"

  1. magorium sagt:

    Happy NewYear ALB42 🙂

    Wow, it was quite a productive year if you put it all in one blog-post 😀

    Thank you for all the support, help and improvements that you’ve made (and Chain-Q thank you as well of course).

    Hopefully the coming year will bring even more good news for us Amiga/AROS/MorphOS-fans and pascal-geeks 🙂

    My wishes for the coming year would be to get some major improvements/changes on the consistency level, in its own turn being able to tackle some of our current issues.

    I do hope to be able to find some more time to play around, making some lcl programs, porting more stuff, offering more support etc. etc.

    And of course i keep hoping some more Amiga/AROS/MorphOS enthusiasts will find their way to Free Pascal and/or Lazarus. For sure we can use some extra pair of hands 🙂

    Keep up the good work ALB !

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