Found this on Virtual Pascal's website:

I don't know if anyone has noticed, but I am sad to report that Virtual Pascal has died a quiet death. It was born in 1995, and died in 2005 at the ripe old age (for software) of 10 years.

What this means to you is that there is unlikely to be more releases of VP, and that there certainly will be no releases with shiny new features in them.

The lack of activity in VP development has been apparent for a long time, and the inevitable conclusion is fairly unsurprising. The reasons for the inactivity are many, but among the main ones are

- VP's compiler codebase has become obsolete. It's written in assembly code, and adding new functionality to the compiler realistically requires that it's written in a higher level language,

- I don't have the time or even knowledge to rewrite large portions of VP (Vitaly wrote the compiler and is generally much cleverer than me),

- Nobody else seems to have the time (or knowledge) required either,

- FreePascal is moving forward and is now actually quite usable. Yes, it probably has its flaws, but it also has a lot of people working on it - and VP does not.


So I guess that's it. If you are happy with VP and it works for you, that's great: please feel free to continue using it. If, on the other hand it doesn't work, there is a bug, or you really need a new feature, then you should probably look elsewhere: FreePascal and Delphi are both fine Pascal compilers that have moved well beyond where VP is ever going to go...

And before you ask, VP will not be released as Open Source. I don't own the copyright to all of the code (some of it is related to Borland's source code) and you have to believe me when I tell you it's so complicated you would not be able to do much with it even if it was available. Sorry!

However, I'll keep running vpascal.com for a few more years and even reply to the occasional forum post or email message.

It was good while it lasted: Thanks for all your support over the years!

(The message was written by Allan Mertner, one of the main VP developers and vpascal.com webmaster.)

http://www.vpascal.com

Source: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

OS/2-eCS-ArcaOS General News

More in General  

OS/2-eCS-ArcaOS Software News

More in Software  

Latest Forum Posts

Site News

More in Site News