Lazarus IDE – write once, compile anywhere

https://www.getlazarus.org/

by thunderbong • 4 years ago

43 50 4 years ago

rcarmo10• 4 years ago

Is there any equivalent to Lazarus that uses a modern programming language and can output standalone binaries? I really miss the days when you could build simple, _native_ desktop GUI apps for various purposes.

(I have been using Godot Engine to do some toy apps and it sort of works, but…)

rahen3• 4 years ago

What's wrong with Object Pascal?

"Plain" Pascal is about as efficient as C, uses slightly less memory, is safer because of its lower dependency on pointers, and is easy to work with, especially with strings.

Then Object Pascal has classes, units, interfaces, generics and type safety. Is it still not enough? https://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal

An alternative would be to build a Go program with a wish/tk frontend, which is also cross platform, native and simple to write. It's actually straightforward to do with go-pipes for the binding with wish, and provides a nice decoupling between the program and its UI. Also, it's fairly small and efficient unlike Qt, or worse, web technologies.

alexvoda• 4 years ago

Indeed, it is a modern language even if it is rather different from what we are used to today (mostly C descendants).

It is a niche choice but it is not outdated.

rcarmo10• 4 years ago

I find it clunky and verbose. I wrote Pascal and Modula-2 during my VAX years and honestly don't want to go back 30 years or so... But I do find go to be an interesting alternative, as long as no web components are involved.

andy128k• 4 years ago

Lack of automatic memory management (garbage collector, smart pointers, ARC...).

jstimpfle• 4 years ago

A couple years ago I worked as a programmer in a 1-2M SLOC enterprise Delphi codebase for 6 months (I believe Delphi is basically Object Pascal). It let me do my work. Under the hood there is the same simple machine model as C and you can access it ok, but the ecosystem around it is considerably clunkier. 90's OOP craze is very present. The various container libraries are composed of different strata of types and classes that do the same things but with different philosophies that were popular over time. Mix of 0-based and 1-based indexing in various string and array types is one of the most annoying problems that I can recall.

Syntax-wise, it was weird the we had to do a lot of "PFoo" pointer-to-foo style typedefs. Syntax has a few strange "addressing" models builtin, including out vars etc. Allocation using "SetLength" is weird, a function that takes a dynamic array can realloc it but the changes would not (or only when reallocation was required?) reflect in the caller. I resorted to plain pointers and manual memory management, because everything else was too confusing for me.

To wrap up, it has a lot of fluff built in that doesn't scale because of non-orthogonality of features, and some OOP that is hard to use IMHO because it is too implicit. As a C programmer I am biased but I find that the usable parts are the C-like parts. The syntax is considerably more clunky compared to C, with all the keywords that tire the eyes and fingers after writing a couple hundreds lines of code.

On the plus side, I'm not an ecosystem guy but I'm sure the ecosystem has a lot to offer functionality-wise, including extensive coverage of the Win32 API. And the compiler is really fast, I have good memories of it and the (Embarcadero) IDE. A big reason why it's fast is that the syntax and module system are better designed than C as far as allowing efficient implementation.

Y_Y• 4 years ago

Qt Creator? It definitely comes with some headaches but it ticks the boxes of being modern and cross-platform. I've used it to develop fairly complex applications that run on multiple OSes and look/feel IMHO pretty good.

rcarmo10• 4 years ago

I an loathe to deal with its licensing requirements, plus I've never been completely comfortable with their IDE

account-54• 4 years ago

Dart/Flutter seem to offer this, modern language, GUI framework, and compiles to binaries or transpiles if targeting web.

mhoad5• 4 years ago

Flutter is almost certainly the answer you are looking for here. You can see what the developer experience is like here https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started/codelab

rahen3• 4 years ago

OP insisted on _native_ desktop apps, not wrapped web apps. Otherwise Java/Swing would have been a no-brainer.

rcarmo10• 4 years ago

No, I don't want any JavaScript in my desktop apps, sorry.

soapdog• 4 years ago

There is LiveCode from https://LiveCode.com

I have been enjoying it to make bespoke gui apps for more than a decade.

haunter2• 4 years ago

Wouldn't PyInstaller solve this? Not a cross compiler though https://pyinstaller.org/

rcarmo10• 4 years ago

The state of affairs for cross-platform Python GUIs is pretty underwhelming right now, and I want something that doesn’t carry a Python disto around. We should be able to do single megabyte executables real again…

s7g2vp2• 4 years ago

have you tried Xojo? https://www.xojo.com/

shrubble• 4 years ago

What is 'modern for you, exactly?

thristian• 4 years ago

As it happens, I'm in the market for a cross-platform, database-driven GUI right now. I'd looked briefly at Lazarus, but the fact it still uses GTK 2 (when GTK 3 has ended development and GTK 4 is available) makes me worry about the longevity of the platform.

That said, my other candidates were learning Tcl to write a Tk app (it's gotta be easier than deploying Python/Tk, right?) or biting the bullet and trying to write a single-page webapp that can talk to a local SQLite database, so maybe GTK 2 isn't the worst thing in the world.

account-54• 4 years ago

I've been in a similar situation. I wanted to write a simple app for desktop and mobile, I didn't want to do a webapp. I'm looking into dart/flutter for this.

mhoad5• 4 years ago

Would recommend, have been playing with it for the last year or so and generally have nothing but positive things to say about it.

signaru• 4 years ago

Are there already recommended widgets for desktop? I've read a little and it seems that you have to write your own widgets or use existing ones that don't seem comparable to something like winforms/gtk. Lazarus is attractive because of RAD, but I'm also on the look for an alternative using a more familiar language.

gattilorenz• 4 years ago

Did you not consider Java, or did you rule it out for a specific reason?

rcarmo10• 4 years ago

I wrote enough Java and Clojure to realize neither would be lightweight enough.

philliphaydon2• 4 years ago

Did you not consider .NET, or did you rule it out for a specific reason?

JediPig• 4 years ago

maui/xamarin is terrible( MAUI is xamarin renamed).

It can't build a macOS desktop version. This was found out a week ago in a "shipping to production" thus forcing a certain team to say no macOS version until v2.. Which is now flutter 3.x now. Flutter better? nah.. just it has a macOS desktop option now.

jcelerier• 4 years ago

Qt has support for various SQL database interop in its data models.

https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/examples-sql.html

Sin2x• 4 years ago

Take a look at wxWidgets, it uses GTK3 for Linux by default.

haunter2• 4 years ago

I thought this is the official page https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ leading to the official binaries https://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/

OP's link leads to a totally different download system

sdfjkl• 4 years ago

getlazarus.org appears to be a fan site. The builds are unofficial, but unlikely to be harmful. Might be safest to get the software from the official site or your distro packages though.

Lazarus IDE – write once, compile anywhere

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