Virtual Pascal - History

History

The compiler was quite popular in the BBS scene, probably because of its OS/2 port and being one of the few affordable multi-target compilers. Also Turbo Pascal had been popular in the BBS scene too, but its successor, Delphi was suddenly for Windows only. Virtual Pascal provided a migration path for existing codebases.

There has been pressure from some users for Virtual Pascal to be made into open-source software. This has not been done, provided the following reasoning:

• The compiler source is mostly written in Intel assembly which is hard to change and maintain.
• Part of the run-time library is proprietary to Borland
• Documentation and help are maintained with expensive proprietary tools
• There is nobody who fully understands the code. Alan said that some of the deeper areas were no-touch for him (original code by Vitaly)