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Comment by haolez | Hacker News Reader

In the same vein, we have Lazarus vs Delphi:

A great piece of software which, very important, runs native on ARM. That is, no cross compiling required to write and compile software for small ARM boards.

I have Lazarus IDE running in Raspberry Pi just fine for one of my fun projects

Lazarus is a lot closer to Delphi though.

That's a solid choice is this arena.

For open source, I don't think there's a better one.

(Multiplatform) GUI is one of those things you really have to throw money at if you value your time.

Yeah. I'm waiting on Red, but have been waiting a long time.

On another note, one commercial option that is very cheap (like $250 for a professional license that is perpetual for that version and collects $0 royalties), but can build GUIs for (Windows, Linux, OSx, Raspberry Pi, Android, and iOS) and has very good built-in database support, encryption, audio, assembly...etc is the forth based 8th language. You can get source with an NDA and $2500 if you really need it. I've only played with it so far, but it is crazy fun and has a lot of built-in goodies. The author fixes many bugs in like hours and will push a new version same day for zero cost.

Links for 8th:

* Home: https://8th-dev.com/

* About: https://8th-dev.com/about8th.html

* Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15672361

First I've heard of 8th, but my immediate reaction is similar to the comments in the HN discussion :/

Understandable. Even if a tool is really nice, once you're used to free and open-source tools, commercial applications seem a bit yucky.

Just to add 2 cents: HaxeUI[1] does this job, is stable and it's being actively developed.

[1]: http://haxeui.org/

Does it allow you to release as a single executable binary?

Yes. It basically outputs the executable binary for the target you choose when compiling your Haxe code. It means you write Haxe source and the 'compiler' (transpiler, actually) generates code for the choosen target. It will then compile the generated code using the target compiler installed in your system, if necessary (when you target C++, for example).

So how we debug the code? I mean other than various form of logging/dump.

There is solid debugging support for most Haxe targets on VSCode[1].

[1]: https://github.com/vshaxe/vshaxe/wiki/Debugging

This is interesting. Will take a look.

Really? What’s wrong with TCL/TK?

There is nothing wrong in TCL/TK. TCL/TK has:

1) SafeTcl for running untrusted code

2) AndroWish for making Android apps

3) Wapp for web apps

4) Embedded SQLite database

5) Expect for automation

6) TclKit for single binaries

7) Hecl for running Tcl code on Symbian devices

8) Fossil that is better than git, stores repo in much less space.

It's not like there is anything wrong in any programming language, when it's still getting features, fixes, security fixes etc.

Problem is, when there is existing large VBA/VB6/VB.Net/Excel etc apps and Microsoft stops developing Visual Basic language.

Unicode support, especially for RTL languages, is abysmal.

I haven't heard of this, or Gambas either. I've mostly just been writing in Python+Qt5, with my last project being a video player frontend:

https://gitlab.com/djsumdog/mpvbuddy

It's alright, and way better than Electron Cancer.

For Gambas models, does it have built-in models that can update their own views or is it all retained mode like all the other GUIs. The one big advantage of web frameworks seems to be how they're immediate mode (using things like the Shadow DOM) so you don't have to emit state changes. It doesn't seem like they're very many non-web based GUI toolkits which can do that (which aren't minimalist and meant for games)

While Lazarus supports multiple OSes, Gambas is pretty much Linux only.

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