Mac Development Question - is free pascal viable?

[Momor]

Greetings,

I confirm it's perfectly possible to make very stable ports of Delphi/Pascal apps to MacOSX using FreePascal. Provided you stick to pure cross-platform libraries (SDL, no Win32 specific code) you should be able to compile your apps in a snap.

Beware of Endianness on PPC though !

[WILL]

Momor! Long time. Hows things? Any chance to see any past Momor Productions game being ported to the Mac?

[Momor]

Hey Will,

Unfortunately past Momor Prods games were using Win32-only components, I would have to rewrite most of them for that. :?

[marcov]

Meanwhile, Lazarus for the Mac (Carbon, without X) is starting to get feature complete and is expected to be usable by the end of the year.

I played a bit with the GUI, porting some (very, very simplistic) game and I was told it has the same problem as GTK2, you can only draw in an onpaint event of the component you are drawing.

If you are creating Delphi games, try to remember this. Never draw outside onpaint events if you want to be portable.

[WILL]

What is an 'onpaint event'?

[marcov]

What is an 'onpaint event'?

TForm.OnPaint is called if a component must draw itself in Delphi or Lazarus.

[WILL]

Oh ok I see. This only effects the GDI environment portability, right?

[czar]

Hi Savage, your pages of SDL/MAC/PASCAL looks really good.

I think I will take the plunge and buy a macbook or imac. I would prefer a MacBook Pro but can't justify the cost, so I am think to go with the macbook. I am not 100% sure if the macbook is the way to go - if anyone has any practical experience I would love to hear it.

My idea is to hang a macbook on a standard PC 22inch LCD - so the small macbook screen wouldn't be a hassle.

From everything I have read I will use the inbuilt Xcode, SDL and possible GNU PAscal or Free Pascal. Does anyone have any good reasons to go with the one or the other?

One last question if the macbook is an intel CPU will the resulting program still work on a powerPC or would that version need to be built separately?

[WILL]

From everything I have read I will use the inbuilt Xcode, SDL and possible GNU PAscal or Free Pascal. Does anyone have any good reasons to go with the one or the other?

Are you asking which would be the better bet between GNU Pascal and FPC? Thats a super EASY answer; FPC all the way! GNU isn't even a compiler technically. It piggybacks off of the GNU C compiler so it's like using a front-end for a compiler of a completely different language architecture.

Also, FPC is really active these days where as GNU Pascal has wound down to a halt? [size=9px](can someone verify/deny this?)[/size] And if I'm not mistaken it's been something like years since a release.

Oh and final nail in the coffin, GNU Pascal's support is hard to locate find where as support for FPC is abundant.

[czar]

ok, FPC it is.

Ok in that case is it better to go

XCode with FPC

or

Lazarus with FPC?