Chapter 37 Further Reading

Official Documentation

  • Free Pascal Process Unit — Documentation for TProcess, used to launch external programs and capture their output.

  • https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/fcl/process/index.html

  • Free Pascal DynLibs Unit — Documentation for dynamic library loading (LoadLibrary, GetProcAddress, UnloadLibrary).

  • https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/dynlibs/index.html

  • Free Pascal Programmer's Guide: Conditional Compilation — Complete reference for {$IFDEF}, {$IFNDEF}, {$IF}, and platform/CPU detection directives.

  • https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/prog/progch1.html

  • Lazarus Wiki: Executing External Programs — Community guide with advanced TProcess usage patterns.

  • https://wiki.lazarus-ide.org/Executing_External_Programs

Platform References

  • XDG Base Directory Specification — The Linux standard for application data, configuration, and cache directories.

  • https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

  • Windows App Data Locations — Microsoft documentation for application data storage conventions.

  • https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/knownfolderid

  • SQLite C/C++ Interface — The official SQLite C API reference, useful for building Pascal wrappers.

  • https://www.sqlite.org/cintro.html

Books

  • Kerrisk, M. (2010). The Linux Programming Interface. Comprehensive reference for Linux system programming. Covers files, processes, signals, IPC, and much more. The C examples translate directly to Pascal external declarations.

  • Richter, J. (2012). Windows via C/C++. Deep dive into Windows OS programming. Covers processes, threads, memory, I/O, registry, and DLLs. Invaluable if you need to call Windows APIs from Pascal.

Connecting to Other Languages

Concept Pascal Python C Go
Environment vars GetEnvironmentVariable os.environ getenv() os.Getenv()
Run process TProcess subprocess fork/exec os/exec
File search FindFirst/FindNext glob / os.listdir opendir/readdir filepath.Walk
Platform detection {$IFDEF} sys.platform #ifdef runtime.GOOS
Call C library external 'lib' ctypes Native cgo
Registry (Win) TRegistry winreg RegOpenKeyEx golang.org/x/sys/windows/registry

Pascal's approach is closest to C: direct external function calls with no runtime overhead.