What is the history of disappearance of GNU Pascal?

[mika]

GNU Pascal is dead for 20-ish years...

Last release in year 2005.

Home page https://www.gnu-pascal.de is still is up and running. Downloads are not accessible anymore (unless someone know exact download link).

Does somebody know what happened with project? Where the contributors went and what they do today?

[marcov]

You can go to the maillist archives on the site. Search for the quo vadis thread in 2010. There is also a summary on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnu_pascal

https://web.archive.org/web/20140714170318/http://fjf.gnu.de/gpc-future.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20150908094319/http://www.g-n-u.de/pipermail/gpc/2010-July/thread.html

In a nutshell, keeping up with major version transitions of GCC was too hard. They were studying on reimplementing using a backend that wrote C, but no news about that was ever brought out. 

There was some support and discussion on the maillist for the versions that were out (gcc 4 based iirc) after that period till say 2015, but after that it has been quite quiet.

The developers in that period also stated that they mostly stopped using Pascal in their daily work, which might have been the final straw.

[MarkMLl]

But at the same time it's curious that GNU Modula-2 has survived.

Support for the language Modula-2 has been added. This includes support for the ISO/IEC 10514-1, PIM2, PIM3, PIM4 dialects together with a complete set of ISO/IEC 10514-1 and PIM libraries.

-- https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-13/changes.html

MarkMLl

[Thaddy]

 for lazy people like me: it was not a a self-hosted compiler. And they did not even try,,,,

[marcov]

And different times. The last major version they adopted was GCC 4.

Nowadays C++ is allowed in GCC, and I've heard Frank wishing for that in the past.

[mika]

https://web.archive.org/web/20140714170318/http://fjf.gnu.de/gpc-future.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20150908094319/http://www.g-n-u.de/pipermail/gpc/2010-July/thread.html

In a nutshell, keeping up with major version transitions of GCC was too hard. They were studying on reimplementing using a backend that wrote C, but no news about that was ever brought out. 

There was some support and discussion on the maillist for the versions that were out (gcc 4 based iirc) after that period till say 2015, but after that it has been quite quiet.

The developers in that period also stated that they mostly stopped using Pascal in their daily work, which might have been the final straw.

Thank you. Exactly what I was looking for.

[MarkMLl]

But at the same time it's curious that GNU Modula-2 has survived.

Support for the language Modula-2 has been added. This includes support for the ISO/IEC 10514-1, PIM2, PIM3, PIM4 dialects together with a complete set of ISO/IEC 10514-1 and PIM libraries.

-- https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-13/changes.html

...And now somebody's adding an ALGOL-68 frontend to GCC https://lobste.rs/s/n8pw5y/algol_68_gcc_front_end

It's going to be very interesting to see whether this gets taken relatively seriously, now that Rust has "softened people up" regarding the merits of strong type checking etc., or gets derided as "just another Pascal derivative".

MarkMLl