[Pkg-pascal-devel] Bug#472304: fpc: doesn't link dynamically

[peter green]

There is some confusion regarding this bug report so let me clear a few 
things up.

Freepascal does not by default link dynamically against pascal code. 
There has been some experimental suport in the compiler for a while but 
I don't think anyone has ever seriously worked through the distro-level 
implications. For dynamic linking to make sense there really needs to be 
a commitment to ABI stability.

A simple pascal program does not use any C libaries (static or dynamic) 
at all. The freepascal run time library makes system calls directly to 
the kernel.

Freepascal programs that use C libaries can and do dynamically link 
against those C libaries.

On the zlib issue. Freepascal ships (and afaict various pascal programs 
use) paszlib which is a pascal translation of zlib. It would probablly 
be good if there was an option to use the C zlib library instead as I 
doubt that the pascal translation is getting much in the way of security 
support.