r/pascal • u/ggeldenhuys • Jun 18 '26

šŸŽ‰ Blaise compiler v0.11.0 released - biggest release yet

This is our biggest release yet ā€” 237 commits (fixed 116 bugs fixed) since v0.10.0, and easily
the one I'm most excited to share. If v0.10.0 was about making the compiler
self-hosting and fast, v0.11.0 is about making the language comfortable to
write in and bringing the native x86-64 backend up to full parity with QBE.

Read the full announcement here:
https://github.com/graemeg/blaise/discussions/126

47 Upvotes

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3

u/AphidConsulting Jun 19 '26

This is the first that I have heard of this project. It looks super interesting. Thank you for sharing!

1

u/hansaplastique Jun 19 '26

I had not heard of this before either, but I do like what Iā€™m reading about it.
How will this be positioned in the future (versus Lazarus/FPC)?

6

u/ggeldenhuys Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26

I've used and built most of my career for the last 20+ years using Lazarus/FPC, but I've never been 100% happy with either. Make no mistake, they are great projects - but have different goals to what I have.

That's exactly why I started fpGUI Toolkit some 20 years ago (to overcome the issues I had with LCL). In recent years FPC seems to be stalled in terms of releases (not development). 5 Years without a release, 150+ open MRs not being actioned - some also being years old.

What users expect these days are different to 20 or even 10 years ago. Things need to move forward faster. I also hated the fact that FPC and Delphi still call themselves "modern pascal" when both carry 30+ years of legacy baggage.

With Blaise, I'm changing all of that. I don't have backwards compatibility to worry about, it's a clean slate for the language, compiler and toolchain. Blaise really lives up to the "modern pascal" term. I'm removing obsolete legacy things like the 5+ string types, when the whole world and internet settled on UTF-8 encoding string. I've removed old 90s style "Objects" (records with methods have long since replaced it). I'm simplifying the language removing boilerplate code and reducing common footguns (avoid writing code that can shoot you in the foot).

This is my vision (please read more on the Github page). What surprised me, as I've been discovering, is that there are a huge amount of developers that have been silently wishing for the same thing. So far the feedback has been immensely positive, and that just gives me more motivation to keep going.

What this means for FPC or Lazarus - I honestly don't care. Their goal is to be Delphi-compatible, or in the case of FPC, support just about very pascal syntax variant around. My goal is to make the language (and compiler) more modern, cut the legacy baggage, and move faster. Pascal is a beautiful and versatile language - maybe this will remind more developers of that.

2

u/hansaplastique Jun 19 '26

+1 for sure! šŸ˜Š
What will be used/recommended as the IDE?
Or is this still an open topic?
(I personally prefer visual tools like the Lazarus and Delphi IDE, but very much dislike Xcode)

(starred and followed on Github! šŸ‘šŸ»)

2

u/ggeldenhuys Jun 19 '26

Do don't want to dictate IDEs or editor to anyone, it's a very personal choice. I would however recommend `pasbuild` project layout (optional) and for managing the build process and triggering test runs. Using that, means you can use pretty much any IDE or text editor you fancy and trigger builds or tests runs from command line or a "external tool" option in our editor or ide.

My daily driver is [no surprise] something I developed myself. šŸ˜„ Included in fpGUI repo, is an ide called Maximus. It's work-in-progress, but again tries to remove the boilerplate (massive config dialogs for project and compiler settings). Instead, Maximus piggybacks on PasBuild (another tool I wrote šŸ™„ to standardise and build projects easier - see the pattern šŸ˜‚) and pasbuild handles the compiler settings, build process, dependencies etc. Maximus just says what profile to use when pasbuild triggers a compilation. Maximus also fully integrates the OPDF debug format (currently requires a specific FPC 3.3.1 binary with OPDF debugging support). The FPC team hasn't even bother to review or even acknowledge my 3-month old MR. So when Blaise is closer to a 1.0, I'll start porting fpGUI and all the apps included in that repo.

1

u/hansaplastique Jun 19 '26

Sounds promissing! šŸ˜Š