With everything happening in the Lisa community, I think it's high time we have a bit more modern approach to development. Our inability to cross compile sources is especially painful given the tedium of getting text onto Lisas. Moreover, I've looked a bit the Pascal compiler sources floating around, and it seems like Apple's compiler does only very minimal optimizations compared to modern compilers. Based on some preliminary research, I think porting the FreePascal compiler to the Lisa should be very doable. Ideally, we could use it to compile the LOS source itself. I have to imagine this would make the OS a bit faster.
My questions are:
- What does LOS's object file format look like?
- What calling convention/ABI does LOS use?
FreePascal is going to be extremely different than Lisa Pascal and I don't think a port would be very straightforward at all, especially since Lisa Pascal makes use of a whole bunch of subtle customizations on top of the compiler Apple licensed like the stack probe insertion.
Since its source is floating around, there's a lot that could be done to improve Edit to make the overall experience of development on Lisa more pleasant. (And if Workshop source is similarly floating around, that would also be a good thing to put some work into improving.)