Global Management of Multiple Compilers in Lazarus IDE

Question

I've been searching around the Lazarus IDE documentation for a bit, and thus far only found information related to cross compiling, so I was hoping someone could give me a straight answer on this. I'm currently working on a project that will require compilation for 32-bit Windows as well as 64-bit Windows. Additionally, I've already set up both versions of the Free Pascal Compiler. Does Lazarus have any built in functionality for configuring in both compilers, and then based on the build target, using the appropriate compiler? Ideally, this would be done at a global level, so that the configuration persists across projects, but if it can only be done at the project level, I don't mind doing it that way.

Answer 1

On further reading, I think I found my answer. I didn't realize it, but fpc has the same sort of front-end functionality as gcc. With that said, implementing the functionality described in my question is just a matter of installing the compiler as a cross compiler, rather than as an independent compiler. Since it doesn't look like you can use the x86_64 compiler to create a 32-bit version, you'll have to compile the 32-bit version, and then crosscompile the 64-bit version. In my case, I first compiled and installed the Win32 compiler using:

make all install INSTALL_PREFIX=C:\path\to\lazarus\1.0.8\fpc\2.6.3 OS_TARGET=win32 CPU_TARGET=i686 PP=ppc386.exe

Next, I compiled and crossinstalled the 64-bit compiler:

make crossall crossinstall INSTALL_PREFIX=C:\path\to\lazarus\1.0.8\fpc\2.6.3 OS_TARGET=win64 CPU_TARGET=x86_64

To confirm that it worked, you can find an executable called, ppcrossx64 in your C:\path\to\lazarus\1.0.8\fpc\2.6.3\bin\i386-win32 folder.