Lazarus – A Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

by Jack4E4B • 9 years ago

236 181 9 years ago

I recently tried out Lazarus, and besides looking a bit dated, it works REALLY well. I had no Pascal experience so it was also overwhelming for a hello world app. But after the basic Pascal "Hello World" command line app, a GUI app didn't even require a tutorial to get working. Really impressed and am considering Pascal for a project.

SXX4• 9 years ago

For me as for the guy who only look at Lazarus not as developer, but as user who just go to compile map editor of our game (developed by other very skilled developer) main frustration was multi-windows interface.

Not that I can't understand why some would prefer to work in that mode, but that alone make it feel more dated than it's actually is. It's still weird why they still ship it in multi-window mode by default, but fortunately all you need to do is install "anchor docking" and then it's become a lot more usable for guys like me.

Also ability to patch and recompile your own IDE on the fly without waiting for half of hour to it to compile is just great. Nothing like that is possible in case of 99% C++ projects.

wolfgke• 9 years ago

main frustration was multi-windows interface.

Multiple windows are very comfortable if you have multiple displays connected to your computer.

tomc19852• 9 years ago

I miss the glory days of RAD

pvg3• 9 years ago

Xcode is a RAD tool at heart so we're in the glory decade of RAD. We just don't call it that.

laythea• 9 years ago

In my opinion, I wouldn't call XCode the pinnacle. That position is for VB/C#.

sien• 9 years ago

That's an interesting point.

However, with VB business users who knew a database would come up with applications that served their needs well.

These applications are still all over many companies and government departments.

In general though, these folks wouldn't be able to do the same with XCode and in addition XCode only targets a platform that isn't widespread in business and government.

pjmlp8• 9 years ago

We doing Windows, OS X, iOS and Android development still enjoy RAD.

jenkstom2• 9 years ago

Perhaps clarification is needed. The glory days of RDAD (rapid database application development). While there is probably something that approaches the simplicity and speed of Delphi's glory days, I haven't found it.

I can think of at least one Delphi developer who went in to management rather than deal with the scaffolding nightmares of current systems. A lot of us followed Anders Hejlsberg when he left Delphi behind and started working on C#. It's very nice, but it's just not the same when working with databases.

jenkstom2• 9 years ago

Amen, brother (or sister).

samuell8• 9 years ago

Lazarus/FPC checks so many nice boxes:

[x] Statically compiled

[x] Native UI on Linux/Mac/Win

[x] Typically compiled without code changes on Linux/Mac/Win

[x] Small binaries

[x] No GC

[x] Readable, somewhat python-like syntax

[x] Still, doesn't rely on indentation for nested blocks

[ ] (Fill in)

generic_user2• 9 years ago

do you know what UI kit is used on Linux?

SXX4• 9 years ago

There are options for both GTK and Qt.

SXX4• 9 years ago

As soon as you need 3rd-party libraries "statically compiled" is no longer the case. Or at least it's not easy, depend on platform and still bring a lot of mess.

Though in the right hands Lazarus is a great tool since relatively complex project could be completed just by one developer. E.g here is our game engine map editor:

https://github.com/vcmi/vcmi_editor

Another thing to note is that FPC provide good performance and even used for game development and memory footprint is small. There is RTS on Steam called Cossacks 3 and it's fully in Pascal (though no idea if they using FPC outside of Linux):

http://store.steampowered.com/app/333420/Cossacks_3/

PS: Another example would be open source Hedgewars of course.

adrianlmm• 9 years ago

I've created small projects in Lazarus and you are right in all points except in the small binary part, also I would add that it comes with db drivers for Postgrees, MySQL and Firebird SQL out of the box.

DisownedWheat2• 9 years ago

Depends on what you define as small but if you remove the GDB debugging information you can trim down your binaries by a huge amount. My last project was 3.4MB.

samuell8• 9 years ago

If you compare to the "modern" way of building cross-platform apps: Electron ... with its 100s of MBs, I'm definitely regarding Lazarus binaries as small :)

tigershark• 9 years ago

No GC is actually an advantage? The world really changed, there are people rejoicing for procedural languages, while we have so many excellent OO and FP alternatives, and they are actually happy to shoot their own foot with manual memory management. I'm not really sure that the change has been for the better.

klipt2• 9 years ago

Lazarus is Object Orientated. Delphi definitely offers garbage collection in newer versions, not sure about Lazarus.

brass9• 9 years ago

[x] Readable, somewhat python-like syntax

I have a rather different opinion on OP that it has a needlessly verbose syntax.

Pythonic it is definitely not. Even C# (which is another creation of Anders Hejlsberg, after MS poached him from Borland) has a better, readable and concise syntax.

I used to be a Delphi evangelist in it's glory days. Now I bristle when I read Pascal source code, there's so much unnecessary visual noise. Of course if your brain is habituated enough to parse Pascal code, eventually you will tend to filter out the begin..end's.

Pascal syntax belongs to C family of language.

As regards to Python-like syntax, I think you are referring to the Nim language, whose syntax happens to be similar to that of Pascal.

epx• 9 years ago

My feeling as well. In my heart I am really happy that Lazarus (and Harbour, the Clipper-compatible compiler) exist, but being rational the days of desktop applications are over.

Python is being run on microcontrollers these days; I actually wrestle with the non-adoption of Python (or Ruby, or Javascript, or Tcl) as 1st-class citizen language for desktop and mobile; it does not make sense for me. Certainly writing desktop/web apps in C++ or Pascal make even less sense.

Perhaps I am forgetting the big number of fellow developers that work on ERP systems and outdated software, for them it is a blessing to have free tools, while in the 90s such a tool could cost $3k.

krylon• 9 years ago

there's so much unnecessary visual noise

FWIW, I took over maintenance of an in-house application written in Delpi/ObjectPascal, with practically no prior experience with Pascal (but one fun weekend looking at Ada), and I had almost no problems reading the code that were caused by Pascal's syntax. It might be because the guy initially wrote the application did a good job, but I found the code very easy to read.

pcblues• 9 years ago

Ex-Delphi developer (10 years) - still do some maintenance...

The verbosity is an indicator that it does not require a huge cliff of learning to understand the syntax. (It also means the compiler can absolutely fly, which Delphi did.)

I like the conciseness of later language structures, but they all need to be learnt in order to read or write in them.

The only solution to the verbosity of Delphi was to increase your typing speed or use an IDE add-in that provided shortcuts :)

So I suppose my argument is that the syntax is not needlessly verbose. The verbosity helped the speed of compilation by the simplicity of its grammar, and the learnability of the language is quite speedy as a result of fewer grammatical options.

int_19h7• 9 years ago

Pascal syntax belongs to C family of language.

It can't possibly, seeing how it predates C.

There are specific differences that set them apart, too. For example, the fact that Pascal has statement separators rather than statement terminators (and using a separator in a terminal position is usually an error, e.g. before "else").

Pascal rather belongs to the Algol family of languages, together with C. Algol-60 is where "begin" and "end" come from.

samuell8• 9 years ago

One of the main points that makes me happy about Pascal syntax compared to some C-family langs like Java is that types are placed AFTER the variable names, making it much easier to scan the left border of the editor for meaningful info.

Happy that recent languages like Go and Kotlin have learned the lesson and are going the Pascal way again.

positivecomment• 9 years ago

Even C# has a better, readable and concise syntax

C# has amazingly easy-to-read syntax, but maybe I'm biased because I'm most comfortable with C-like syntaxes.

geff82• 9 years ago

[x] Easy string handling (compared to C)

I like how you say python-like syntax... as so many borrow from Pascal

mmargerum• 9 years ago

I would love to switch off Delphi, but I'm heavily dependent on spring4d which is Delphi only right now. I may build some smaller programs or utilities in Lazarus.

samuell8• 9 years ago

Btw, OmniPascal for VSCode is also worth a mention as an alternative for quick edits, or for coding those CLI apps in pure FPC. A really nice project, which also helps showing that Pascal is Alive and Kicking :)

http://www.omnipascal.com

(Only issue is Linux support is not (yet) on par with Windows and Mac ... but then, it is open source, so that could change!)

Zablus2• 9 years ago

Just wanted to mention OmniPascal :)

What's about Linux support? It's working on all platforms, isn't it? http://blog.omnipascal.com/omnipascal-0-14-0-mac-and-linux-s...

leledumbo4• 9 years ago

Yes it is, finally :) I like the ability to extract build information from .lpi, despite still needs a lot of work (macros won't work), already lifts the burden to write the unnecessary build scripts.

scardine• 9 years ago

I wish porting projects from Delphi was easier. I was trying to make Python bindings for the AcBR library[1] and failed miserably.

Shameless plug: if you think you are up to the task and is not too expensive contact paulo at xtend.com.br

[1] http://acbr.sourceforge.net/drupal/

Jack4E4B6• 9 years ago

There is another Pascal project out there called Oxygen by the folks at RemObjects. Not free, but I've heard good comments about it: http://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/oxygene/

rgacote• 9 years ago

I'd definitely use it more if I could port over the last few Delphi apps I have in production. My Delphi 7 is getting a bit old...

Aside from single-file executables, the biggest advantage to Lazarus (and also Delphi) [to me] is that all the libraries are also built in the language. No needing to bounce down to opaque DLLs just to display some GUI element.

iajrz2• 9 years ago

A bit old is an understatement :^) why not update to more recent iterations of Delphi?

iajrz2• 9 years ago

Just in case, I found this: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Delphi_Converter_in_Lazar...

throwaway76459• 9 years ago

I see Lazarus pop up on HN occasionally. It's an IDE for FreePascal right? I guess I'll have to open the article again. How are the database drivers? I've been told they're ageing. Is there 64 bit support for Windows or only 32?

Zablus2• 9 years ago

There is a Win64 compiler and it's working great! I don't know anything about the database drivers.

throwaway76459• 9 years ago

Just tested it out and confirmed.

DisownedWheat2• 9 years ago

I'm no expert by any means, but I just opened Lazarus to look at the DB drivers and they seem pretty respectable. The MySQL driver only goes up to 5.6 but works well in my experience. I haven't tried the SQLite, Postgres, ODB or MSSQL drivers though.

Also it does support 64 bit, I have a 64 bit Lazarus installed on my Windows VPS.

throwaway76459• 9 years ago

Glad to know, thanks for the pointer!

leledumbo4• 9 years ago

As MySQL develops, the bindings are updated as well, but most people will have to wait for stable release. If you use trunk, though, you can enjoy it right away because MySQL bindings has been designed rather easy to port a new version.

boznz• 9 years ago

FYI 5.6 drivers work on 5.7. not extensively checked but my database application worked fine after mysql was updated..

Jack4E4B6• 9 years ago

Lazarus is awesome because of the speed of the compiler, the fact that it has a GUI that works, and is OPEN SOURCE.

So one wonders WTH is going on with all the other compiled languages that have nothing like this? And no QT is not the answer, we need a built-in good enough GUI! =)

necessity• 9 years ago

IIRC Delphi compilers are usually single pass and thus really fast

gardnr2• 9 years ago

That is correct and it is why all the variables must be declared before the "implementation" section of a unit. The compilation felt instantaneous.

jcelerier5• 9 years ago

we need a built-in good enough GUI! =)

what do you call built-in ?

whitea• 9 years ago

mORMot framework is also a nice example for modern Pascal... https://synopse.info/fossil/wiki?name=SQLite3+Framework

It has DDD, SOA, MVC, ORM (even for NoSql), REST, caching, logging and security features and works with Lazarus.

zoom6628• 9 years ago

Looks great - have added to my research list on FPK. Thanks.

edwinyzh3• 9 years ago

mORMot is very full-featured and powerful! I'd suggest to start with its rich set of samples (https://github.com/synopse/mORMot/tree/master/SQLite3/Sample...) and this blog: https://tamingthemormot.wordpress.com/

sctb• 9 years ago

We've updated the description from “Proving That Pascal Is Alive and Kicking Ass”. Submitters: the guidelines ask that you please don't editorialize titles.

Jack4E4B6• 9 years ago

That headline made people read... and your current title is not fully accurate. It is a Delphi inspired Pascal for sure, but not fully compatible, more like a free alternative.

Tomte• 9 years ago

Exactly. Your title was clickbait and dishonest.

We don't accept that here.

bigtunacan4• 9 years ago

A bit funny seeing this on here tonight. My teenage daughter was looking to create a native desktop app and I pointed her to Lazarus just today. Then I login and check Hacker News...

systems• 9 years ago

How do you avoid spaghetti code, in an environment like lazarus?

undreren3• 9 years ago

Discipline. The same way you do in Java and C#. Don't use singletons and global variables.

analognoise• 9 years ago

I'll take this one - architecture.

So you can setup a very standard MVC or MVVM architecture using Lazarus.

I bought this book to help:http://www.apress.com/br/book/9781484222133 it uses Delphi, so there's translation to do, but the concepts are the same.

Also, Lazarus has an amazing community that's a joy to be a part of, and is extremely welcoming.

I'm a hardware jockey (mostly) so if they can explain it to me, literally anyone can get it.

To boot, there are a number of excellent older texts that are just a few dollars, and all the concepts are the same.

There's new material being produced more and more for it as well.

What I'm trying to say is: join us... One of US. One of US. One of US....

edwinyzh3• 9 years ago

That's an interesting question. Lazarus is an IDE like Visual Studio or the JetBrains ones, and it has nothing to do if you write spaghetti code or not, try google "SOLID" instead on that subject.

Johnny_Brahms2• 9 years ago

As someone who maintains a multi-MLOC application in fpc (using emacs and lazarus): discipline.

You don't grow an application to that size by simply building on what might be suitable for a 30kloc application. It requires discipline, experience, trial and error and ability to invest time in properly maintaining the codebase.

Disciplined code review by people very familiar with the codebase is vital.

badsectoracula8• 9 years ago

My personal approach is to create a unit to contain the classes for the "thing" i am working with (e.g. for a 3D world editor, i create a unit that was a TWorld inside, perhaps with TEntity and other classes). Then create another unit for the global stuff (lately i've taken a liking to use a TDataModule which can be edited visually even though it is a non-visual thing - it allows me to place non-visual components in an IDE surface which helps assign event handlers and properties from the editor without writing code for that). Then from the GUI side i just make calls to the global unit/datamodule and/or to methods in the classes i work with.

Of course it all depends on what i'm making, for simple stuff i just throw everything in the form code directly. For more complex stuff i use the method above.

Here is an image showing an example of the approach:

http://i.imgur.com/cm4VTHn.png

The "GlobalState" window is an IDE window that represents a TDataModule (the name sucks and probably is for Delphi compatibility, it doesn't have anything to do with "Data" and because of that i ignored it for years) that contains the "SimpleViewportRenderer1" and "ViewportManager1" non-visual components - instances of the TSimpleViewportRenderer and TViewportManager component classes. This is in its own unit and can be accessed by other units, essentially providing global state (note that a data module is really a class - much like forms - but you can have a global variable with a single instance of it - again like forms). The neat thing with this approach is that it can also be seen by the IDE: the Viewport1, Viewport2, Viewport3 and Viewport4 components in the Form1 form have a property that accepts an optional TViewportRenderer component. This is presented as a combobox in the Object Inspector window and when you pull it down, one of the options is "GlobalState.SimpleViewportRenderer1" - so you can wire together components 100% visually.

0xbear2• 9 years ago

Now someone just needs to clone C++ Builder and we'll be all set. Power of C++ with the simplicity of Delphi.

Tom4hawk• 9 years ago

QT Creator is really nice.

0xbear2• 9 years ago

QT is really expensive for commercial use though. And it's not as easy as Builder was. Builder basically gave you Delphi capability but in C++. You could focus 100% on the problem you're solving rather than on the UI -- true component based RAD. Drop a few components, wire them together, then add your code to do what they can't do.

leledumbo4• 9 years ago

No other RAD claiming IDE has the same RAD capabilities as Lazarus or Delphi (or C++ builder), including QT Creator. Live database connection and manipulation while designing your form and data module? Nah, it doesn't even know what a data module is.

cturner• 9 years ago

I use Free Pascal at times. In case there are any FP developers here: your build arrangements hamper my use. I tried installing earlier this week from source and could not get it going.

My ideal would be a single configure/Makefile combination in the root directory. Consider if the user does not have root, how are they to set a prefix?

The idea of the 'build' download is good, but not if it needs to link to recent shared-objects. Particularly recent shared objects like libc. Maybe you could put statically-linked tools in the 'build' version.

MageSlayer5• 9 years ago

I guess you need to contact devs to clarify. I regularly build from sources for Linux and cross-compile for Windows both x32 and x64 using just single "make ..." command.

rcarmo2• 9 years ago

I mentioned Lazarus in other threads a few days ago (since my kids are playing around with it) and it's great to see it as a top-level post. Some random thoughts:

- It's somewhat amusing to realize that in 2017 this is pretty much the easiest way to do a desktop app (besides RealBasic/Xojo which I've yet to try - was put off by their mandatory registration)

- I wish we had RAD environments like this for more languages (Racket, Python, etc. - even JS).

- On the Mac, installation is a bit fiddly. It needs a little polish and support (a standalone, integrated bundle would be better, or at the very least a unified installer).

- We've been retrofitting web UIs to desktops to such an extent (I'm looking at you, Electron) that the tiny, supremely efficient apps Lazarus spits out put the last couple of years into stark perspective (2GB RAM used by Slack, etc.)

I love Lazarus, and hope it helps resurrect the RAD approach for other languages - if anyone knows of any similar environments (besides QtCreator, etc.), could you share the links?

dkersten11• 9 years ago

I've not used Lazarus or Delphi, so I can't really compare properly. Perhaps I'm missing something. But:

if anyone knows of any similar environments (besides QtCreator, etc.)

Why "besides QtCreator, etc"? It sounds to me almost like "do you know any X besides all of the popular X". Is there any particular reason you discount QtCreator? Does it not work for your purposes? Or is it just a case of you already know about it and want to hear about more obscure tools?

It's somewhat amusing to realize that in 2017 this is pretty much the easiest way to do a desktop app

I've found Qt with QtCreator to be an incredibly productive way to develop desktop applications. Both old-school QWidgets-based Qt with QtDesigner (the RAD portion of QtCreator for pre-QtQuick) and QtQuick/QML with and without its RAD interface.

I wish we had RAD environments like this for more languages (Racket, Python, etc. - even JS).

I've used the Python version of Qt with QWidgets in the past and it was a pretty nice workflow. I've never done it personally, but I know of people who use Python + QtQuick/QML and seem pretty happy with it. There's also various "app builder" tools for JS, but I don't know how good they are.

chx• 9 years ago

There is https://blind.guru/qta11y.html as a problem with QT, I think it made to HN like three days ago.

MageSlayer5• 9 years ago

As a Delphi/FPC/Lazarus veteran (10+ years), comparing one of the quickest compilers with Qt/Boost C++ development cycle looks like a joke. Much faster edit-compile cycle which scales without issues up 1e6+ LOC (yes, modules/incremental compilation done right right from the start)

pjmlp8• 9 years ago

Because QtCreator isn't up to the job compared even with Delphi 1 for Windows 3.x, but sadly the younger generations never got to use it professionally.

Delphi and Visual Basic, were like the Smalltalk/Lisp Machine (I am exaggerating a bit) of the RAD programming generation.

Try to create a database frontend or image manipulation program in QtCreator just with the GUI designer.

badsectoracula8• 9 years ago

Why "besides QtCreator, etc"? It sounds to me almost like "do you know any X besides all of the popular X". Is there any particular reason you discount QtCreator?

I know Lazarus (almost) inside out and i've tried several times to use QtCreator, mainly because C++ would allow me to reuse some of my C code. However i could never get used to how QtCreator expects from me to do more stuff, how unweildy the laying out widgets is (this is natural since Qt's layout management was made expecting programmers to do layouts via code but compared to Lazarus' alignment and anchor based layouts they feel like taking a step back - although the same can be told with Lazarus' layout if you try to do it via code) and other not necessarily big issues but still annoying enough for me to always drop it.

rcarmo2• 9 years ago

I want more tools. Qt is popular and I've tried it before, but it keeps cropping up as "the new RAD" in these discussions and I was (unsuccessfully) trying to steer the discussion away from it.

lyrachord• 9 years ago

X rough, python no not-bad native widgets, Qt not well designed(@see blog don't use Qt, G)

squarefoot2• 9 years ago

"It's somewhat amusing to realize that in 2017 this is pretty much the easiest way to do a desktop app (besides RealBasic/Xojo which I've yet to try"

If you're interested in Basic programming then Gambas might interest you. Although not a clone of VB, it can be roughly considered being to VB what Lazarus is to Delphi: a 100% Open Source implementation. I would prefer Lazarus anyway, but it's indeed nice to see different alternatives to proprietary dev systems.

http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html

anfractuosity• 9 years ago

I remember one BASIC, called RapidQ, which I really enjoyed playing with a long time ago (which was freeware, but unfortunately I think it stopped being maintained as the source was sold to another company).

It had a rather cool graphical interface to create GUIs, kind of like VisualBasic I think.

It even had APIs to interface with DirectX.

Pic of what the IDE looked like: http://basic.mindteq.com/Screenshots/RapidQ.jpg

bigtunacan4• 9 years ago

That project looks pretty cool actually. It is unfortunate that it is not cross platform.

throwaway76459• 9 years ago

As awesome as Lazarus appears to be here, Rebol is even more amazing in my opinion. There is no designer, but the GUI DSL is mind bending. Red is a Rebol inspired language that is also tiny with a compiler as well so you can build a nice cross-platform-native GUI and distribute it as a tiny executable (~1.5 MB). You can see the GUI stuff for both Rebol and Red. There's a YouTube video by Nick Antonnacio (spelling) that shows him building something like 40 GUI apps in an hour ranging from email apps to games like tic-tac-toe and snake...it was pretty crazy to see the first time.

I'm checking out Lazarus currently.

hdhzy3• 9 years ago

Do you mean this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=D50XULVZaYY ? Looks nice!

thro1237• 9 years ago

Now, if it can spit out Android apps :-)

alex-e2• 9 years ago

Speaking of the bloated slack client, there's a new native desktop app for Slack, Skype, and many others:

https://eul.im

It's only 4 MB and uses ~100 MB RAM.

wikibob• 9 years ago

Do you know who's behind the project?

exikyut• 9 years ago

Wait, how are you doing Skype?

nibblerres• 9 years ago

Kamelåse så fedt. Sykelkugle!

fithisux2• 9 years ago

Do not forget also the tremendous effort in the Free Pascal other big IDE

https://sourceforge.net/projects/mseide-msegui/

It is a pitty dev pascal didn't catch up or ported to FPC.

dvfjsdhgfv• 9 years ago

Looks interesting. What are its advantages when compared to Lazarus?

leledumbo4• 9 years ago

Smaller and simpler (written in old Delphi, with some 3rd party packages, so Windows only), nothing else I guess. Lazarus is far superior in every other aspects.

WildParser• 9 years ago

I've made the mistake to write a complex project in Free Pascal. As far as I can tell pretty much every release of Lazarus is breaking something. And surprisingly often those breaks are major (like e.g. broken multi-threading, broken-strings, ...).

For me the whole thing looks more like a playground for hobbyists and is not really useful for anything productive. There's not much continuity in the language. And for the devs something like 95% compatibility seems to be good enough.

For small projects it might be ok to use, but you better keep your snapshot of the compiler locked in a safe place.

On the other hand: If you're young and want to make history as the guy who replaced all those begin/end in pascal with smileys: This project might be your chance...

wiz21c• 9 years ago

I like your comment. It highlights what misses from so many discussion about languages/tools down here. Being expressive, powerful, compiled, interpreted doesn't matter much if long term stability, reliability, backward compatibility are not a top goal for the devs.

wruza• 9 years ago

The same was for Delphi, but no one complained in such way. Your sources were to update accordingly, or you simply remained on previous version, which was not a bad thing, because it is your app, it was working yesterday, why would it break tomorrow?

For new projects you took new libraries.

Personally, I don't like the modern idea of autoupdated anything. Once program is tested and deployed, only cherry-picked (or backported) security updates must be applied.

samuell8• 9 years ago

I have had best success by using the (very stable) version provided in (X)ubuntu LTS, which I'm always staying with, so I'd say it is about finding a good strategy for version selection.

badsectoracula8• 9 years ago

Your project was probably doing something wrong or weird since the Lazarus and Free Pascal developers have gone to great lengths to avoid breaking backwards compatibility - i have code from 10 years ago that compiles almost without changes. The only change that i have to do is when i abused strings as byte buffers that wouldn't work in Free Pascal 3.0. However that was something the FPC developers said for years and they made several release candidates so that people can report back issues. Even then the change was simply replacing all uses of `string` with `rawbytestring`.

The only backwards compatibility breaking they do is when they are fixing compiler bugs that shouldn't be used anyway. For example at some point it was possible to take the address of a property getter and this usually worked, but not always. They changed that to be illegal (according to the language reference it was illegal anyway) so any code that relied on that would need to change (a simple change would be to make a new property or function that gave back the address of the private reference and mark it as inline so that you wont get any performance penalty).

Personally i am very anal about backwards compatibility and i have abandoned tons of libraries (SDL, GTK, Qt, etc) because of that. In my experience Free Pascal, LCL and Lazarus are among the most stable frameworks to the point that they prefer to keep unnecessary things around for years just in case someone is still using them or introduce unnecessary options for the framework to change behavior in case someone is still relying on the old one (this is why for example you get a `RequireDerivedFormResource:=True;` line in new projects, older projects wont have this line which affects the behavior of how forms are created).

Obviously i don't know what your project was doing but you don't really provide any description (both of the issues you mentioned i haven't encountered), so i put my counter-experience here since i wouldn't like people to get the impression that Lazarus doesn't care about backwards compatibility. For me it is a prime example of a very complex project doing backwards compatibility right (hell, the Lazarus IDE itself can even be compiled with Free Pascal compilers that are years old just in case someone might for whatever reason - like the few cases mentioned above, or use FPC from some Linux distribution that only has old versions - be stuck with them). Things that break backwards compatibility are considered important bugs and are fixed - sometimes even at the cost of getting things "right".

MageSlayer5• 9 years ago

Broken multi-threading, broken string, ... Care to elaborate? UTF8 move perhaps? Which native compiler/RAD got UTF8 for free? Virtually every C/C++ project was "broken" in that respect at some point or even now.

I use both Lazarus & FPC from trunk (in between releases) and even then backward compatibility is of top priority to FPC devs.

Johnny_Brahms2• 9 years ago

I work with a multi-mloc application in fpc. We have migrated the code over many compiler versions with hardly any issues at all.

With every update they post a list of things breaks compatibility, and if you are affected, the refactoring tools are almost always enough.

We had two tries at a full recompile migrating from 2.6.something to 3.0.2, and passed all tests within 13 hours of starting the process. (some of the larger stuff were however already fixed since we keep a close eye on the development).

throwaway76459• 9 years ago

What are you doing with a million lines of Pascal? It sounds interesting!

int_19h7• 9 years ago

While we're at it, for those times when you're hacking on console apps, FreePascal also has a very nice text-mode (TUI) IDE that is basically a Turbo/Borland Pascal 7.0 IDE clone - but cross-platform.

To do that, they had to port Turbo Vision (or rather its open source fork Free Vision). It's still a great TUI library... it's a shame it's Pascal-specific. Would be interesting to have an implementation of it for, say, Python, for system tools and the like.

pjmlp8• 9 years ago

The Turbo Vision IDE was actually introduced with version 6.0 as an example what the framework was capable of.

It was later available in C++ as well, and there is a port available.

http://tvision.sourceforge.net/

int_19h7• 9 years ago

Yeah. I was thinking more like C (with possibly glib as the object model), so that it can then be wrapped in Python etc.

throwaway76459• 9 years ago

Hoe do you run it?

int_19h7• 9 years ago

Even that is a throwback to Turbo Pascal - you type "fp" in the shell (on Windows, after adding C:\FPC\bin or equivalent to your PATH).

samuell8• 9 years ago

One of the things I'm excited about, is using FPC/Lazarus as GUI for computationally heavy Go code (Now with the recent efforts to use Go for datascience ... see http://gopherdata.io), now since Go supports shared object (.so/.dll) files.

I collected my (very early) research on it in this thread:

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=24948.0

... where some users report they tried it already. Seems to work, if not super smooth. Hope it can be improved in the future.

Jack4E4B6• 9 years ago

Great news, the key comment there was that Go supports calling from other languages: https://dev.to/vladimirvivien/calling-go-functions-from-othe...

samuell8• 9 years ago

For the FPC/Lazarus project as a whole, it is also good news that there is some work going on to build up a foundation (it exists already), with funding and stuff, to support further development:

https://foundation.freepascal.org/

Among founders being Delphi luminaire Boian Mitov (author of Visuino / OpenWire / OpenWireStudio etc).

Hoping the foundation can take off with some good funding.

edwinyzh3• 9 years ago

I've been watching the foundation since it's creation (I think it's over one year ago), I don't think it has done any significant help to the FPC/Lazarus development so far. Anyhow, such effort is plausible. On the other hand, open source projects like this (http://newpascal.org/) is what actually driving open source going forward.

samuell8• 9 years ago

For anyone looking for a proper, "modern" introduction to Object Pascal, as found in FPC/Lazarus, don't miss this excellent guide:

http://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal_introduction.html

Lazarus – A Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

Related Stories