As has been said many times anything that goes on in fpc is made by volunteers in their own time and not steered by a project lead or any milestones.
Indeed. However, leadership and management is still required though, it's a project after all. Leadership is required to maintain the vision of the project and management is required to keep the project on the track. That's why some other voluntary-based open source projects have some kind of a board like in a company. I think both FPC and Lazarus lack of true leadership and management, but more on seniorship and skill. If you've been with FPC long enough or you contribute lots of code to FPC, then you got some respects. It needs more than that to keep these huge projects go well with time and new people.
Changing stuff in the front end on the other hand has a tendency to affect everyone so it has to be done really carefully so you can keep trusting fpc to be a high quality compiler
A high quality compiler is not only talking about stability and performance, but also about features. Turbo Pascal is really a high quality compiler, technically speaking, but it's useless because it doesn't provide many features of modern programming.
There are 2 kind of ways of thinking in technology:
1. Backward compatible, is to keep new features always operatable on past or old technologies, no matter the cost including sacrificing new technologies.
2. Forward compatible, is to keep new features always ahead of past or old technologies, no matter the cost including sacrificing old technologies.
Each has its own dis/advantages. I think FPC is on the first one. I hope NewPascal to be on the second one. I personally prefer the second one. As Izak promised to work on NewPascal based on FPC's master repo, then we got the best of both world. I don't know if Izak would or could keep his promises, but it's good enough for me to switch to NewPascal once it goes public and stable.
@hnb:
FPC just released new "default namespace" feature. It's not actually a new feature in modern programming because many other languages had provided it long before Pascal. And it also had been requested many times since long time ago. But at least Pascal has it too now, finally. I hope it will go to NewPascal as well.