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Comment by sevensven | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Lazarus 2.6 for a free time project since August as I've used Delphi 1.0 in the early nineties and I wanted to see if this was any good.

I've been blow away with it, it's Delphi brought from the dead :)

It has been a real pleasure to use and I've come to appreciate the productivity that it brings, as this open source IDE is on par with what I remembered from early Delphi versions and, amazingly, I feel this is the cleanest way to target mac and linux GUI apps today (YMMV).

It's a shame that there is no support on SWIG for freepascal but it will get there eventually.

So, kudos to the freepascal and lazarus teams and thank you very, very much!

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...Delphi's not dead - see http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi, now it's cross platform, modern language features - generics, lambdas etc etc. Writing a Mac app in it right now :-)

"cross platform" to whatever they feel like. I remember in college my teacher bought the new version for that. Turned out "Native Android support" was phonegap which isn't native.

Absolutely false:

http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/compiling_android_apps_delph...

College was before 2013 and I haven't looked at it since.

It's actually native now, albeit kind of a mess (or at least the C++ version is; I haven't used Delphi). For example, Windows/x86, Windows/x64, and ARM are all different compilers (OS X and ARM are both clang; x64 is an older clang, x86 is totally different) that support different features and have subtly different behavior sometimes. Then there are differences between VCL and Firemonkey, so don't even try porting an existing Win32 app.

It's only portable if you try really hard.

You're right, I didn't intend to state that it was :)

After starting to use lazarus, I've seen the youtube tutorials by Embarcadero on Delphi 10 targeting mobile apps and it looks like a very productive environment: https://www.youtube.com/user/EmbarcaderoTechNet/playlists

I just find the price tag for the current delphi way too steep (+5k usd?) and I think that was part of decline of the suite.

Being able to target linux GUI is really relevant for me and freepascal + lazarus provides that. Delphi doesn't.

current pricing makes it dead.

You missed out the whole hype.

For us who use stuff on a regular basis the changes seem small but peu a peu these add up.

Once an electrician still developing in spare time who know Turbo Pascal 5 from school while servicing the air conditioner saw me programming. When he heard that I would use Pascal he looked at my screen jumped from the ladder and left the office together with me after midnight.

Freepascal is indeed a very solid approach I use on Linux especially. Works great on Windows too.

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