Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE (opens in new tab)

Initially, I was skeptical and thought that this is the millionth vibe-coded project that will die once the author gets bored.

However, when I checked who the author is, I found he is is Graeme Geldenhuys, the author of the fpGUI library [1]. He surely has a lot of experience with FreePascal and the Pascal language, and in these years he has proven to be a committed worker (fpGUI exists since 2010!). So, this project seems to start on good grounds!

I really hope it will gain traction, as I have often wondered myself why somebody would not create a “clean” Pascal compiler from scratch with no legacy cruft and good defaults (e.g., UTF-8 strings, inline variable declaration).

[1]: https://fpgui.sourceforge.net/

“ The Object Pascal ecosystem has two options: Embarcadero Delphi (proprietary, Windows-first) and Free Pascal…”

This part isn’t true, for many years now we’ve also had Oxygene - https://www.remobjects.com/elements/oxygene/ (also proprietary)

That looks cool. If they support binary releases on macOS Apple Silicon I will try it out.

I wrote one major project in UCSD Pascal on Apple II 45 years ago: my Honnibo Warrior Go Playing program. For its time, a fantastic dev environment.

Looks interesting. As someone who's been using Pascal since Turbo Pascal 6, and use Delphi daily at work, I'm not sure I quite get the "COM-style interface GUID" objection. What exactly about it is complex, and how do you implement Supports() without it?

Excited to see another project targeting the QBE back end, from what I can tell it's a great lightweight alternative to LLVM.

It is a bit curious with the Mojo 1.0 beta coincidence, as Pascal was the other langauge with a highly readable and quite simple language combined with performant compiled code without GC.

What it lacked was a modern compiler and stack. There is FreePascal for sure, and Lazarus is impressive, but it for sure has its baggage.

For me the only reason to use pascal is GUI apps but this doesn't have it.

Does this support declaring variables anywhere (as opposed to only in the beginning of a function)? That was my primary complaint when using Lazarus.

Will you port it to 32 bit? There's already a QBE port for it.

That’s so great! Thank you!

I wish something like this existed for Ada :)

Looks cool and does aim to address some of the annoying warts in Pascal. Especially the memory model.

Can this compile these games?

https://jxself.org/git/supernova.git

https://jxself.org/git/beyond-the-titanic.git

Ok, there's no way to bootstrap it without FPC... can the compiler compile itself?

Sorry, I don't trust a compiler project that's done in 3 weeks (I've checked the repo commits history). Downvote this if you want.