Are We Dead Yet?

[olly]

CuriousKit has quite a few pending too, I believe he just waits for current ones to be merged before adding more.

Migrating to Gitlab was a very good choice though we don't look quite as "dead" now!

[fcu]

even if its dead , delphi7 is 22 years old and still so many peoples using it 

[mercurhyo]

@Joanna

they do such for years (decades) and we (pascalish community) still are alive and straight in our boots.

So let it be. it came from a psy issue like "jealous kidos wanting to kill their father" 

NO CHANCE

[runewalsh]

There are enough pascal haters everywhere I go they should not be in here as well.

Joanna, I have studied your drama about IRC trolls and trolls in general, very interesting reading, but I assure you I’m not the one (and frankly, you should get outdoors more often, hopefully reducing your rate of false positives to a reasonable amount). Supporting means pointing out problems (and willing to get their solutions, that’s the difference from haters), and I consider 6.5 COMMITS IN LAST 10 DAYS a slightly disturbing sign.

For example, I’ve read the legends about a person (found his name: Maciej Izak) who had implemented management operators in his own fork, expressed his dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in mainstream FPC, and I even vaguely remember his strong disagreements with the FPC team (reluctant to add them or so). And management operators are simply my favorite feature by now. The stance that Pascal is perfect and wonderful and doesn’t need any such fanciness would left me without them (in favor of feeling safe and comfortable... psychologically, but not when coding something related to acquiring or releasing any resource), thus hurting in the long run.

And to continue what @ccrause said, while I am not skilled enough to make FPC features routinely, I made a whole one (!!!) which may be so called. Doesn’t that give me the right to “hate” (make harsh remarks about) my language with a clear conscience? Not to troll, but to strive for perfection.

I have found with Lazarus, may or may not apply to FPC, patches are preferred to pull requests.

I have found it as well :D, but patches are very inconvenient to keep up to date (and this might be the reason of the preference you noted — patches not applied soon will rot over time without warning).

[PascalDragon]

I don’t understand why threads disparaging pascal and advertising c++ are allowed in a forum that is supposed to be for supporting people who use fpc.
How is letting people get away with attacking us in our support channels going to make fpc more popular?? Have some self respect for once!!
There are enough pascal haters everywhere I go they should not be in here as well.

Please stop disparaging other users, especially if it's a user who has already contributed quite a bit to FPC. runewalsh simply expressed concern due to reduced amount of commits.

1) Since the beginning of the year, there have been three times fewer commits into the compiler than in corresponding periods of previous years (350+ vs. 1000+; didn’t count the amount of changes though). At what point should I start to panic? I don’t want to switch to C++...

Some times there are more quiet time frames.

2) What’s up personally with FPK? He was the only person who occasionally accepted my weird MRs, and looks less active for quite a time.

The problem is also that your MRs aren't just simple MRs that one can simply apply, but one needs to verify that they are really useful and not just simply some kind of bandaid. I think FPK himself had already said something similar to you regarding this (or maybe it was only on the core mailing list 🤔)

[BeniBela]

I justcounted the posts on the fpc-devel mailing list:

2018: 414
2019: 766
2020: 457
2021: 341
2022: 332
2023: 200

This gives  a linear regression of  posts =  -71.09*year + 144047, which predicts that in three years (i.e. 2026.26), there will be no more posts at all on the  mailing list.   It is as good as dead. Not even Lazarus could resurrect like that

[ASBzone]

2022: 332
2023: 200

Are you taking into account that we are still in the middle of 2023, and not even at the half-way point?

If the pace of commits held up for 2023, we would end up with over 500 commits this year.

[BeniBela]

2022: 332
2023: 200

Are you taking into account that we are still in the middle of 2023, and not even at the half-way point?

If the pace of commits held up for 2023, we would end up with over 500 commits this year.

I only counted January to early May each year

[440bx]

I think it is very risky and likely quicksand-y to draw conclusions based on the number of posts related to FPC development.

The reason is, a high number of posts may simply be related to how to implement just one feature that various developers have different views about yet the majority agree it should be implemented.

Also, as a product becomes more mature, particularly a compiler, there will be (or should be) fewer and fewer modifications/enhancements to discuss.

IOW, the lower number of posts seems completely normal to me given that FPC is a fairly mature compiler and not an indication of its state, dead, dying, alive, etc.

For an indication of "liveliness", I consider the number of participants in this forum to be a better indicator.

[DavidL]

2022: 332
2023: 200

Are you taking into account that we are still in the middle of 2023, and not even at the half-way point?

If the pace of commits held up for 2023, we would end up with over 500 commits this year.

Um, he counted posts to the fps-devel mailing list, a dubious metric, at best.

[ASBzone]

Um, he counted posts to the fps-devel mailing list, a dubious metric, at best.

I agree that it is a dubious metric, but that problem seemed greatly compounded by comparing different durations of time, so I commented on that part.

[Seenkao]

I justcounted the posts on the fpc-devel mailing list:

2018: 414
2019: 766
2020: 457
2021: 341
2022: 332
2023: 200

бесполезное сравнение.
Google translate:
useless comparison.


Для того чтоб понимать что различается в разработке, нужно заниматься разработкой. Я могу править одну проблему, которая занимает очень много времени и приходится править значимую часть кода. А так же могу решить множество проблем, которые мелкие и при этом потратить малое количество времени на их правки.
Google translate:
In order to understand what is different in development, you need to engage in development. I can edit one issue that takes a very long time and I have to edit a significant part of the code. And I can also solve a lot of problems that are small and at the same time spend a small amount of time on editing them.

[ASBzone]

For an indication of "liveliness", I consider the number of participants in this forum to be a better indicator.

True... And even that has its limits, in that the posts on this forum largely consist of requests for assistance from people that have problems they are looking to resolve (majority of posts), or sharing updates that benefit the community (minority of posts).

And I'm not suggesting that there is anything wrong with the distribution of posts -- the members of this community seem to be very focused on why they post here. Generally, there isn't just a whole lot of chit-chat just for the sake of chit-chat. 

I imagine that there are many avid users of both Lazarus and FPC who, lacking issues in their development experience, are very active coding, but not very active posting.

A very lively forum is not necessarily indicative of the health of an ecosystem, as anyone who has ever witnessed the support forums of a product in its death throes can well attest.

Ensuring viability is a noble goal, but confusing popularity or boisterous activity for health, is not helpful to that goal.

[Fred vS]

You should also take into account that fpc is on GitLab now.

And if you take a look at "issues" (that is used also for comments) and "merge-requests", not really the desert there  :
https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/issues
https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/fpc/source/-/merge_requests

[440bx]

For an indication of "liveliness", I consider the number of participants in this forum to be a better indicator.

True... And even that has its limits,

Yes, most definitely.

The "trend" I view with concern is, it seems that without the RAD development environment (Lazarus and Delphi, neither of which are computer languages, just environments), Pascal does look like it is dead or close to dead.

An example that supports that concern is GNU Pascal.  It was/is a good compiler.  It is dead and likely because it didn't/doesn't have a RAD for it.

It looks like the percentage of programmers actually using Pascal is small, much smaller than the percentage of programmers using RAD environments that use the Pascal language (Lazarus/Delphi)