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An article from 2013 with an adobe photoshop version 1.x from 1990....


I'm pretty sure half of that code is still running in WASM on photoshop.adobe.com


You mean current photoshop includes pascal code?


Tools used for art often get irrationally preserved for the sake of it. For example I have had a conversation with more than one person (well 2 but still) who believed unironically that the wiring inside vintage guitars and amps must be coated with asbestos insulation or it would change the tone/texture of the sound.


Don’t crush that in a hydraulic press.


What's wrong with Pascal, apart from the ability to hire developers for it?


I hated the dialects of Pascal we were using at school in the early 1980s because they didn’t really support systems programming but after I got a 286 machine I got into Turbo Pascal which did have the extensions I need and that I preferred greatly to C but I switched to C in college because I could write C programs and run them on my PC or on Sun workstations with a 32 bit address space.


Turbo Pascal and later Delphi were really nice, but I guess in the same vertical C won due to its UNIX legacy.

You can pretty much transform 1:1 between C and Pascal code.


Writing in Pascal itself is a Job Preservation Pattern


Nothing wrong, just surprised


I would not be surprised if it does. Photoshop is big and has a lot of legacy.


I have a feeling that much of it was translated to C or C++ at some point for portability and maintainability reasons. There are several automated Pascal to C translators out there, such as the following...

http://users.fred.net/tds/lab/p2c/

Also the languages are similar enough that a programmer with knowledge of both could translate it manually without too much difficulty.


Typically TeX is translated from Pascal to C too, via web2c.

But there also is a Pascal to WASM compiler out there, which was written specifically for TeX:

https://github.com/kisonecat/web2js

TeX itself is only about 500kb of wasm, uncompressed, but the memory images with LaTeX loaded are quite a bit larger.


It was transpiled to C and then C++ many years ago.




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