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The original Delphi compiler which was in use until some versions ago (and might still be available, dunno) was much faster than Free Pascal while producing mor

The original Delphi compiler which was in use until some versions ago (and might still be available, dunno) was much faster than Free Pascal while producing more or less the same quality code (in terms of performance) but could only target Windows. Free Pascal targets a bunch of other CPUs and OSes though. I haven't tried any of the recent versions, but AFAIK they're based on LLVM so i'd expect compilation times to have went up but produced executables to be a bit faster. FWIW Free Pascal's developers have mentioned at the past that fast compiler performance isn't really something that they care much about (though in practice FPC is among the faster compilers, just not as fast as Delphi used to be).

justin66 6y ago
> FWIW Free Pascal's developers have mentioned at the past that fast compiler performance isn't really something that they care much about That's an interesting evolution. It had a lot of nice features, but compile time was the only thing about Delphi that was really magical.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  Well, Free Pascal was never as fast as Delphi and i doubt its feature set would allow it to be as fast anyway. Delphi only supported a single platform for a single CPU for the largest majority of its lifetime whereas Free Pascal supported a ton of different CPUs and platforms while also adding support for a variety of different Pascal dialects at the same time and often extending the language beyond what you'd see in Delphi - all that adds up quickly. Still, as i wrote, in practice FPC is quite fast. Lazarus itself is almost two million lines of code and yet it compiles and links in seconds.