FreePascal March update...

[savage]

Latest news from www.freepascal.org...

Lots of new progress in March, but too busy coding to update the website, so this entry will be a summary of progress on the main (2.1.1) branch:

* Thomas Schatzl is making good progress with the linux 64-bit PowerPC port. A snapshot is here
* Peter did a Titanic work, and crafted an internal linker for win32 and win64, reducing linking times tremendously. For such a complex new subsystem, it is already quite stable.
* DWARF debugging info support is slowly starting to work. Stabs will be phased out in time.
* Florian just showed a first "Hello world" program for Win64. This is remarkable since GCC and the binutils don't even support this target. (Internal linker!)
* Jonas reported that he has ported to Darwin/i386 with remarkable little effort. Snapshots are expected in the coming weeks.

[WILL]

This is excellent to hear.

I wonder how long until we can look forward to a working internal linker for Linux.

Also question for any FPC ppl here; Are all these internal linkers being created as a part of the compiler it's self or are they a single or several seperate executable(s)?

[dmantione]

The internal linker is part of the compiler. By doing so the linker has more information available what can be removed from the final executable, we will for example be able to smartlink resource strings, virtual methods and even debug information.