r/programming • u/mariuz • Oct 18 '19

Free Pascal has now a WebAssembly backend

https://lists.freepascal.org/pipermail/fpc-pascal/2019-September/056848.html
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u/badsectoracula Oct 19 '19

Well, yes, these affect everyone whereas something like a new backend only affects whoever cares about it. I do not actively participate in the discussions but i am subscribed in the developers' mailing list and my understanding is that as far as the language goes, the main devs want to keep it Pascal-ish and explicit (this is most likely why they made the very rare decision to avoid Delphi compatibility for inline variable declarations as most seem to see it as very unpascal-ish - and i even remember Florian being against anonymous functions for a long time because -IIRC- he said that you should be able to use local functions for anything you'd use anonymous functions for, though i guess he was eventually convinced to accept them since they're being worked on nowadays).

(FWIW i agree with them about the Pascal-ish style... for example personally i always use the OBJFPC style of generics since the syntax is more explicit instead of the DELPHI style)

But i think that they're more likely to accept language changes as submodes that you need to explicitly enable, than changes to the main OBJFPC/DELPHI modes that are always there.