Hello,
Actually, I have a number of questions. I believe that a little background will be helpful to understand the nature of the questions and what I'm thinking of doing.
Long ago (Win95 era) I wrote a little utility for myself to make Delphi 2 compile hundreds of programs (close to a thousand) just by dragging and dropping the "root" directory that contained all the programs each in their own subdirectory. The utility simply walks the directories and does a full build of the program found in each directory. Aside from the convenience of a single drag n drop operation to compile a large number of programs, the utility made compiling about twice as fast as it would normally be. On an ancient machine (if memory serves, Celeron at 800 Mhz), that utility got Delphi 2 to compile a little over 10,000 lines per second, which is very useful when there are so many programs to compile/recompile.
One of the utility's characteristics is that it included a copy of Delphi 2 as a binary resource. That way it was self contained. Since it was (and still is) strictly for personal use, i.e, never distributed, that was not a problem.
The reason for this post is that I am considering creating a version of that utility for FPC and, I am also considering making the utility available to anyone who could benefit from it.
That brings up a licensing concern. Specifically, the utility would have a copy of ppc386.exe and ppcrossx64.exe embedded as binary resources (untouched, exactly as they appeared in the FPC distribution, i.e, no customization of any kind in the source code nor the embedded binary.) My first question is: would embedding those untouched, binary-only copies of FPC legally require that I make the utility's source code available ? (I would definitely prefer not)
The other question is related to the exe sizes of ppc386.exe and ppcrossx64.exe. together they weigh about 4.5 megabytes and, I was wondering if there are "Windows only" versions of them that are smaller ? if the answer is "yes" where can I find them ?
Any and all information concerning the above is appreciated,
Thank you for your help.