Lazarus Version 1.6 | Hacker News Reader

Lazarus Version 1.6

getlazarus.org

114 pointssysrpl47 comments

It might be worth noting that 'getlazarus' is an independent project from the Lazarus IDE itself, it uses more up to date releases that are yet to be available and is designed to be much friendlier to use.

> much friendlier

I'll say. Just watching the video I felt like I had a peek into developer heaven. Pretty nice amount of polish there.

Now imagine being used to this in the mid-90's and then being dropped into UNIX CLI, vi (no vim on those days), Emacs and C.

I like Lazarus a lot. I guess I should maybe develop some more GUI tools with it.

About setup on MacOSX: I think it could be easier by having it in Homebrew. Or as a self-contained app bundle. (I found a Homebrew Caskroom Lazarus package. But that seems not up-to-date? Also, maybe it should be in the main Homebrew tree?)

Edit: Maybe actually installing from here is easier: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=downloads

This installer uses homebrew or macports. You get to choose:

http://www.getlazarus.org/setup/?download#macintosh

I love modern FreePascal with Lazarus; I wish there were more recent books about it, but it's a wonderful language and IDE.

I really hope people here give it a shot.

Although there is plenty of information out there, I am working on making tutorials, guides, a new language reference, and even some lexical diagrams in SVG:

http://www.getlazarus.org/learn/language/lexical/

The video on the Application Explorer shows a Lazarus IDE 1.7 ?!

Great diagrams, BTW ! Love the overall very modern look of the website.

Regarding 1.7, I distribute builds based on the trunk revision which is usually pretty far ahead of the release versions. Thanks for noticing the website design.

Agreed but it isn't curated information - I bought a bunch of old Pascal books but finding newer info that isn't Delphi specific is pretty damn hard - a set of design pattern books for FPC guis would be amazing. The forums are good though!

Could you refer me to good modern resources? I am fluent in C programming and would really like to get started with Pascal and Object Pascal using FPC and Lazarus. I really think the language adds a lot of nice things compared to C without sacrificing C's advantages and without becoming C++. The only problem I'm currently facing is finding resources to learn.

I really like the fact that Lazarus is easy to build (even on my Windows system).

1. grab the source code 2. make install LAZARUS_INSTALL_DIR=C:\lazarus NOGDB=1 3. done

Anyway, it's nice that we have an open source, cross platform Delphi-like environment :D

A question for Pascal programmers: have you used Pascal for web development? And would you recommend it for web development? If so, how did you find its speed of execution? By web app development, I mean code that runs server-side and processes forms, or generates pages dynamically.

Web development is dominated by dynamic languages, but surprisingly few compiled languages seem to make headway in this space. The Go programming language looks like it might change that, but other compiled languages remain quite niche.

I know many people baulk at the idea of running an "old" compiled language like C or Pascal, but these languages seem (to me) to remain extremely fast and very light on resource usage. Two qualities that feel a bit out of fashion in todays web programming environment.

Yes I do, but not as old style PHP or ASP (html pages server side rendered). I use AngularJs for the front end and a CGI/Stand Alone servers written in Lazarus/FPC server side.

Please take a look at the Brook Framework, it allows developing REST applications: http://silvioprog.github.io/brookframework/

Thanks for posting this. I am an old Pascal programmer. Love the language and did a phd thesis entirely in the old turbo Pascal IDE. (All programming + using the editor for LaTeX files).

the brook framework doesnt seem very active

The GitHub repo doesn't, but Silvio is working privately on the new 2.0 version. Also there's a Google Plus community https://plus.google.com/communities/101133820055678331036

Anyway, the current version is very stable, I use it since a couple of years without a glitch.

I wouldn't call JVM and .NET platforms a niche, unless you mean AOT only languages and even in that case there are AOT toolchains for JVM and .NET.

Regarding Pascal, Delphi does have components for web development, but given its current enterprise focus they are more tailored to bring existing Delphi applications to the web, not for greenfield projects.

AdaCore has a web stack for Ada in terms of Pascal family of languages and web.

In addition to the Brook framework mentioned above, check https://github.com/synopse/mORMot. Maybe start from this blog post by the author: http://blog.synopse.info/post/2015/01/10/mORMot-under-Linux-...

This looks amazingly comprehensive and high quality for a non mainstream language. I wonder how difficult it would be to get something like Rust, Nim, D or Crystal to be able to call the FreePascal ABI and link with this.

I've wondered the same for quite a while, or just to see similar projects for other languages. I would love to see an IDE like this for D definitely.

The D IDE Coedit is written using Lazarus:

https://github.com/BBasile/Coedit

It reuses the Lazarus code editor and other things I am sure. I'm not entirely familiar with language constructs of D, specifically reflection (RTTI in Lazarus) and properties/events which are the magical glue that makes Lazarus work the way it does.

I've tried using Coedit, it's not exactly a user friendly experience I've had, I wound up going back to textadept instead. Edit: I didn't know it was built on Lazarus / FP.

You should try version 2, it's better. It supports DUB natively now.

The D IDE Coedit is not a RAD tool like Lazarus. It does nothing with reflection, like Lazarus does, typically object streaming based on what's done by the user in the visual designer, written to a file, that get linked in the final application and reloaded at run-time with object de-streaming.

In comparison, Lazarus + LCL + packages is 1.59M SLOC while Coedit barely reaches 30K SLOC.

Coedit is really a simple program, it's just an editor dedicated to D, with facilities to compile projects (DUB, DMD-based custom format) and also to run D modules from scratch, it's just a GUI with a lot of piped sub-processes under the hood ^^

IIUC, there's https://github.com/buggins/dlangide that's gonna become a RAD tool, based on this GUI library: https://github.com/buggins/dlangui .

Probably not "hard". Delphi/FreePascal interop with C apis just fine, and even with C++. For example, all the VCL (the GUI toolkit on Delphi) is based on the WIndows API, just with better feel

It's status as "mainstream" is of course debatable, but Object-Pascal (aka Delphi) is #10 on TIOBE: http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index

Lots of "famous" software has been written in Object-Pascal: https://jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/famous-s...

Just a pedantic comment, Object Pascal was actually developed by Apple with feedback from Niklaus Wirth as their main systems programming language (in the early days) and later adopted by Borland for Turbo Pascal 5.5 on MS-DOS.

I for one was really surprised at the list of software written in it listed in the second link. Skype? Dreamweaver? Really? I wonder how much of Skype is really still developed in it. Regardless...interesting list.

I'm always reminded of number 43 in the list of Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument "You used to program in Pascal, didn't you?" http://www.pigdog.org/auto/mr_bads_list/shortcolumn/1914.htm...

(And yeah I did - I liked it too!)

The TIOBE index is Delphi's best showing. Object Pascal recently got a (sensible) boost in how its TIOBE rating is calculated: http://chapmanworld.com/2016/02/09/delphi-jumps-to-10th-plac...

I haven't seen Delphi feature in the top ten in any other language index so the TIOBE ranking seems to be an outlier, which is a shame because Object Pascal is a nice language.

Pascal was surely mainstream in the 80's and 90's, with Turbo Pascal being the most famous dialect, to the point Pascal vendors ignored the ISO Extended Pascal favoring compatibility with Turbo Pascal instead.

For those of us into it, C wasn't never a thing neither we could get the famous rant from Kernighan about the language, as no serious Pascal developer would use the bare bones original ISO standard, just like most C devs never used pure K&R C back then.

In the day someone made an interface between Delphi and Python that allowed a nice integration. You could execute Python scripts from Delphi code and call Delphi forms from Python.

Not sure if it's the same thing, but I found this: http://wiki.freepascal.org/Python4Delphi

That was to address if it's possible or easy to interface with Object Pascal. No idea about the languages you mention.

Yep, that's the same one. PyScripter, the open-source IDE for Windows, is written in Delphi with the Python4Delphi component: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pyscripter/

I installed lazarus (not from this website) two weeks ago and I was annoyed of the multi window (à la GIMP) thing. It seems it has been changed in this particular version ? I wonder, because the IDE in the video of the front page is showing a 1 window IDE.

By default it works in a multi-window envidonment, but if you want you can install the package AnchorDockingDsgn (from the Package->Install/Uninstall Package) that lets you "dock" the windows you want.

Tried it on my hi-DPI Thinkpad, needs hi-DPI support to be usable there. I remember being quite fond of Delphi when I was a student. No programming environment before or after Delphi has let me focus _only_ on the problem at hand, and no environment had made it so easy to create and reuse components.

This looks like a pretty good equivalent to VB before it went all .Net and got a steeper learning curve.

Similar idea as old VB, but in no way equivalent. Much better language, much better component system.

Am I the only one thought it was a new release of "Lazarus: Form Recovery"?

Never heard of that. But FWIW: the name does actually reference a previous dead project.

This seems useful for cross-platform desktop UIs. Are there any Pascal compilers targeting iPhone & Android?

FreePascal (the compiler Lazarus uses). You might even have luck with good ol' p2c if you're desperate.

Delphi does. It's good, but expensive: http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

I was really disappointed this wasn't Lazarus Form Recovery back from the dead. What is this project about?

This is an IDE for FreePascal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com