Free Pascal Compiler at its very beginning on Loongson

After weeks of silence, Linuxer on Lemote forum finally made a little progress again. "Jiao Lin Tan Suo" said earlier today that he has been porting FPC to Linux-Loongson platform for some time. He has implemented the cross-compiler as the first step, and then used non-cross-compiler running on Loongson to implement a HelloWorld.pas successfully. The compiler itself is written in Pascal, completely independent of gcc.

It is just the beginning.

Correction

In a recent post I said that float point(FP) ability of Loongson cannot be fully exploited by gcc because gcc only take use of two FP elements of total four in Loongson. That is not exactly true. Loongson Instruction Set has special instructions like multiply-add (MADD), multiply-subtract (MSUB), etc. Every FP element can execute an MADD-like instruction but gcc can not generate assembler executables with these Loongson-specific advanced instructions. As a result, one MADD will be cut into a muliplication and an addition by gcc, being executed in two steps. So the complier seems utilize only two of the four FP elements in effect.