Virtual Pascal

» see vpascal.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Virtual Pascal was a free 32-bit Pascal compiler with its own text mode IDE, built for OS/2 and later for 32-bit Windows, with a short-lived Linux branch on the side. Vitaly Miryanov wrote the original, and the tool chain underneath it was mostly x86 assembly, which is why it compiled so fast and why it eventually became impossible to maintain. Allan Mertner took over as maintainer and owner, published under fPrint, and carried it from version 1.0 in April 1996 to 2.1 build 279 in May 2004. The project is dated to 1995 at the front end, a year ahead of that 1.0, and 1995 is also where the author counted from when he later said the thing had lived ten years.

The reason it had users at all was Borland. Turbo Pascal had been everywhere, including on the bulletin boards, and then its successor Delphi arrived as a Windows-only product. Anyone with a working 16-bit Pascal code base and a machine that was not running Windows had a problem, and Virtual Pascal was the answer: Turbo Pascal compatible at the source level, and willing to emit the same program for more than one operating system. For a few years in the late 1990s that combination had no real competition at a price a hobbyist would pay.

OS/2 is the gap in my own 1990s. Windows is what sat on the machine at home, and the system that gave this compiler its first and best target was something I read about in magazines rather than booted. The Borland half of the story I can follow unaided, because Turbo Pascal's name got absolutely everywhere, Turkey included. The half that gave Virtual Pascal its actual users, people still shipping OS/2 software in 1997, is a room I was never in.

~ the chronicle ~

~ why it had to be os/2 ~

A compiler that only targets the platform everyone is already on is a convenience. A compiler that targets the platform the vendor abandoned is a lifeline, and that is the market Virtual Pascal sat in. Its OS/2 support is listed first in every description of it, and the bulletin board scene adopted it for exactly that reason, along with the fact that it could produce console programs for several systems from one set of sources.

It was never only an OS/2 tool, though. It handled the 32-bit Windows API in the plain way, without COM, and it could port Object Windows Library code forward in theory. A separate Linux version appeared on 4 July 1999 under Jörg Pleumann and had its last release on 26 September of the same year, eighty-four days later.

~ the open source question ~

Users pushed for years to have the source released, and the reasons it never happened are unusually well documented. Part of the run-time library belonged to Borland. The patch tool used to work around that was itself proprietary and 16-bit Windows only. The documentation was built with expensive tooling that in some cases no longer existed. And underneath all of that, nobody fully understood the compiler any more, including the man who owned it: Mertner said outright that some of the deeper parts, the original Miryanov code, were areas he would not touch.

That last admission is what actually ended it. A project can outlive its author losing interest, but not his losing the ability to read it, and by 2001 the releases had already dropped to maintenance only.

~ the last post on the site ~

Build 279 of 13 May 2004 turned out to be the end of the line. The notice went up on 4 April 2005 and it was short: the project had died quietly, and ten years was a long life for software. Given how little had been happening the news was not supposed to surprise anybody. The site would stay online for a few more years.

It kept that promise and then some. vpascal.com still answers today, but what it serves is not Mertner's page. It is ten kilobytes of recycled encyclopedia text about Virtual Pascal with a hosting-coupon affiliate link dropped into the middle of a sentence, which is what happens to a domain whose owner stops renewing his attention to it. The compiler is still findable elsewhere. The front door belongs to somebody selling something else.

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