I see in the Delphi forum on fb that Jon Aasenden is preparing to release his Quartex pascal compiler. He claims it is significantly faster than FPC and is ‘76%’ compatible with fpc/delphi. It sounds like it does not do generics for arrays. I presume this means it would be significant work to make cge apps to build with quartex?
This looks like reincarnation of Smart Mobile Studio (which itself a fork of DWScript). How is it faster than FPC when the thing just transpiles pascal code to javascript? Unless the dev’s comparing it to:
- pas2js, which itself is a separate project and not true FPC.
- wasm, but I doubt quartex is faster, especially with tools like wasm-opt optimizing the binary output.
Actual benchmark code would be nice 
And yes it will be significant work to get CGE to work with quartex. I assume it does not even support pointers or pointer arithmetic for that matter. You can take a look at DWScript to compare its syntax with FPC/Delphi.
1 Like
Ok, then no go. I uses pointers extensively to walk large arrays of data. It is much faster than using the index.
I would advise to ask Jon Aasenden directly
He’s a very professional person, he’s active ( https://quartexdeveloper.com/ , https://jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com/ , you also mentioned he’s on FaceBook), he cares about Quartex Pascal, he knows everything about what Quartex can do (does it support pointers, generics etc.), he knows how Quartex compares to Pas2JS and FPC+WebAssembly (that we use for web ). And he knows about our Castle Game Engine too, I recall he commented about one of our posts o FaceBook
So, he could possibly answer some questions posted in this thread, and we would have more hard knowledge (and less speculations ).
It is also possible he could give someone a trial/free version of Quartex for testing for the purpose of researching compatibility with Castle Game Engine. I’d be happy to do such research too (though I would be even happier to delegate it ).
If anyone wants to contact Jon (@edj , maybe you can ping him on FaceBook), you’re welcome to ask him about possibility of CGE support. If he wants, he’s also welcome to answer here on the forum.
While there’s no free quartex pascal compiler available yet, the free smart mobile studio compiler is available here for anyone who wants to test the language.
I would love to know what changes in quartex pascal compiler (mainly language features) compare to his previous work in smart mobile studio
I had actually been communicating with John when I posted my query. He is on vacation now.
1 Like