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Free Pascal

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Titt:
As far as I know, all of Kornel's roguelike projects are written in Free Pascal. I have always heard serious programmers talk about Pascal as being sort of a "toy" language, like BASIC, but I assumed Kornel was just most familiar with Pascal so it was most comfortable and effective for him to use it. So it surprised me to see that Free Pascal does very well in the programming language benchmarks shootout. Here is its comparison to gcc, the GNU C compiler, one of the tightest compilers for any language, ever, and Free Pascal does only marginally worse on CPU time for most benchmarks, and noticeably better on memory use. Weighing CPU time, memory use, and program size with equal weights, Free Pascal does better than all other compilers in all other languages.

These benchmarks are highly artificial and definitely don't take into account many (perhaps most) of the factors that are important in programming, but it still was a surprise to me, to see Free Pascal perform so well. Kornel, what do you use to write graphics to the screen in your roguelike projects? Is there something like curses available for Free Pascal?

ParaSait:
So if I understand right, a freeware compiler is way better than a paid compiler? Weird...

rekenne:
This is not a terribly odd thing, really.

Rabiat:
I don't see why Pascal would be considered a toy language by anyone who could be seen as a 'serious' programmer (whatever that is).

Also, I don't think there's a strict relation between the quality of a compiler and the language it parses.

Jim9137:
When people say "pascal is a toy" they usual refer to Turbo Pascal and other such relics from 80s.

Damn stoned junkie programmers, I DO NOT WANT.

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