FPC (Free Pascal Compiler) version that is easy to distribute together with CGE.

This repository contains our infrastructure to build FPC Free Pascal Compiler version that we can easily distribute together with Castle Game Engine binary download.

At this point, these are both Jenkins and GitHub Actions jobs.

Why

• The goal of this is to provide ready working FPC along with the CGE download for people who don't want to use FPC outside of CGE.

  Maybe they are new to Pascal, maybe they are new to FPC, maybe they just "want something that works with CGE as easily as possible" and don't care about having specific FPC version etc.

  It is important that CGE works as "out of the box" as it can, to be friendly to new users. Part of this is that you can "just download Castle Game Engine, create new project from template, hit F9 and it builds and runs".

• We don't fork FPC here.

  • Because we don't want to have additional maintenance burden of synchronizing it.

  • Because we always want to allow using FPC as distributed by FPC team and we're proud of it. This repository just provides an option, easy option, for people who don't want/need to manually get FPC from https://www.freepascal.org/ or https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ .

How

• We want a binary FPC build, as a simple zip, for major platforms supported by CGE.

• This repository contains Jenkinsfile (see about Jenkins) to build FPC for major CGE supported platforms (Windows/x86_64, Linux/x86_64 for now).

  The results of this Jenkins job are what will later be placed in CGE binary download.

  The same job is for now also run on GitHub Actions, .github/workflows/build.yml. We're in the process of moving to GitHub Actions fully.

• FPC is build, installed and packaged to a simple zip. Later, such bundle is included in CGE binary download.

• Note: We don't use binary downloads from https://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/ , as for Windows they only contain FPC in exe (installer) format and they don't provide zip for Linux. We don't use binary downloads from https://sourceforge.net/projects/freepascal/files/ as for Windows they only provide Win32 installers (and not Win64 that is expected by most users).

  Building FPC ourselves, as a simple zip for all platforms we need, is simplest.

Future

• This may be extended to include extra platforms. Cross-compilers, in particular between Linux/x86_64 and Windows/x86_64 and to Android are nice ideas.

• We may devise a similar idea for Lazarus IDE. While Lazarus IDE is not such critical need for FPC (you can even perform full build+run from CGE editor without Lazarus), but in the end we want to recommend people some Pascal IDE. We support anything (Lazarus, Delphi, VS Code, Emacs...) but still it's nice to recommend something for people new to Pascal.