Lazarus Release 2.0.0 | Hacker News Reader

Lazarus Release 2.0.0

forum.lazarus-ide.org

55 pointsdvfjsdhgfv17 comments

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This project had significant attention on HN as well as a repost recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18856123

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19085802

For an explanation of why this makes the current submission a dupe, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19103247.

Another good Lazarus discussion from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14973706

> but about one per project per year is the right amount for HN to host

Does that mean the arbitrary, catch-all VS Code release threads are finally going to stop, too?

Sure, if they fit the criteria. Keep in mind that we don't see everything and so can't catch all of these. If you see one that we appear to have missed, it would be helpful to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.

Edit: while I have you, could you please not create per-comment accounts? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. For explanations about why, see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

Well when there are version releases I think they should come through. A lot of time I have a wait till they have feature x included.

The time stories are on the front page can be just a few hours. They might have been a big story in one time zone and then the later time zones don't see the story.

All true, but front page space is the scarcest resource on HN. The approach I explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19103247 has proven to work well.

Btw, you can see front page stories you might have missed at https://news.ycombinator.com/front.

a comment: when posting links like this, please add “(Free Pascal IDE)” to the title. I tried Lazarus years ago and knew what it is but many people on HN might skip over this link not knowing what Lazarus is.

Both Free Pascal and Lazarus are great projects! I have warm feelings about Pascal because I wrote my Go Playing program for the Apple II. Several years ago someone paid me to convert one of my open source projects to Pascal and Free Pascal and Lazarus made it fun to do.

What Lazarus and Free Pascal need is someone to sponsor a full-time technical writer to produce reference and tutorial documentation. There so much potential in both Lazarus and Free Pascal but I suspect many curious minds give up because of the scattered and often out-of-date docs. The official Free Pascal documentation is terse and formal, but not ideal for learning purposes.

So many people complain about Electron or rush to use it. Yet, Lazarus gives you cross-platform apps with self-contained binaries. How many people will never give it a second glance because there's no getting starting guide to ease them into the language and tools? (I realise some people, possibly many, will never give it a chance because of Pascal).

Interesting aside and previously discussed on Hacker News:

Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages: How does energy, time, and memory relate? - Pascal ranks well in this analysis.

https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15249289

>So many people complain about Electron or rush to use it. Yet, Lazarus gives you cross-platform apps with self-contained binaries.

- The UI has the same old "grey boxes" style that plenty of classic desktop libraries used.

- For online apps, you don't get to reuse any parts of your web app (which probably has a fairly similar UI anyway).

- Imagine trying to create something like Spotify, or Slack (complete with inline HTML previews and videos and whatnot), or even VS Code with this.

- From a brief look, it seems all UI code has to use imperative mutations (`setText`, `addItem`, `hideButton`, etc.). There is nothing like React as far as I know. I'm not even aware of any "old school" data binding library. Correct me if I'm wrong.

This is not a practical alternative to Electron in any significant way. Maybe for some niche uses (small tools, etc.)

I agree, the documentation is difficult to find and work with. That's why I maintain a few useful resources that are shared with the community.

Here are the reference documents in searchable form. It can be easily integrated into the IDE with F1 context sensitive help opening the appropriate pages:

http://docs.getlazarus.org/

Also to help you understand the Free Pascal dialect you can interact with my railroad diagrams:

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

Also you can just use or add to the Lazarus learning portal or for that matter any page on my site (it's a custom wiki type website):

https://www.getlazarus.org/learn

Only thing I wish would change about Lazarus is the UI. It's too much like the old Delphi IDE UI, I'm thinking Delphi 7 and probably before. I would love to see it become a toggable thing or something. I hated that GIMP used to do the same.

Lazarus is great, I wanted to make my own basic text editor ages back with syntax highlighting, and it worked out really well. Unfortunately as it stretched further than I knew Delphi / FreePascal I left my project to die. I had redone it in Qt with C++ years later, but only got as far as building a Notepad cross-platform application (no syntax highlighting).

Heck if Lazarus did what VB6 did for managing windows, I wouldn't be as bothered, I just want to jointly contain all the available UIs so I don't lose a piece.

> Only thing I wish would change about Lazarus is the UI. It's too much like the old Delphi IDE UI, I'm thinking Delphi 7 and probably before. I would love to see it become a toggable thing or something. I hated that GIMP used to do the same.

I didn't understand what you meant by "toggable thing", until I gave Lazarus a try. Yeah, launching an IDE and getting four floating windows feels weird today. I'm sure tiling-window-manager fans like it, but for the 99% rest of the population it feels untidy and cumbersome. Wish they add, and default to, a single-window mode, like GIMP did in 2.x.

>Yeah, launching an IDE and getting four floating windows feels weird today. I'm sure tiling-window-manager fans like it

Doubt it -- tiling window manager fans use tiling window managers to get windows stuck into place and easily controlled.

That is, they have even less tolerance of floating windows than the average user.

I'd say it's not that they like it, but that thanks to tiles they have the means to remedy all the floatness.

If you want a single IDE window simply install the anchor docking package. It docks all windows into one window with docked windows that can be moved around.

See: https://cache.getlazarus.org/images/lazarus-docked.png

That's part of the power of Lazarus and Free Pascal. It has the ability to rebuild the IDE right in it, and anyone can easily add new or optional packages to alter it in any way they please.

See also this overview: https://www.getlazarus.org/new/

I've gotten it working once, and I can't recall what I did to get it to work since, but it was buggy as one would expect sadly, it just didn't feel like it was fully implemented. I would love for this to be a standard instead of an addition, but I make Lazarus work for me when I do use it.

If you install Lazarus using the bundles on my site all these things plus more tweaks are already installed and configured for you.

https://www.getlazarus.org/setup/?download

Also the bundles I put together give you more recent revisions than whatever is in your distros package repository or whatever was last put together on the official project pages.

My setup scripts and installed are all freely hosted online, and if you want to build both the compiler and IDE from subversion I also have a few guides for that linked on that same page.

What is the macOS support like on this, is it using Cocoa underneath?

During the first compilation on macOS with Lazarus, I saw a number of references to carbon in the message area. I'm running 10.11.6 (High Sierra).

The Release Announcement states the requirements for macOS:

Mac OS X: 10.5 to 10.12; Carbon (32bit), Cocoa (64bit, beta), qt and qt5 (32 or 64bit).

The Lazarus project seems to be working on a Cocoa interface (among many other tasks); see http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Roadmap

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