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Comment by bloblaw | Hacker News Reader

For Windows users, just use chocolatey and run: `choco install lazarus`

...and you'll be up and running with (1) FreePascal compiler (2) Lazarus IDE (https://lazarus-ide.org) with integrated debugger and RAD (Rapid Application Development) GUI designer.

Lazarus and FPC can create high-quality native GUI's for macOS, Linux, and Windows. And many open-source 3rd party GUI components can be installed right from within the Lazarus IDE via the "Package" > "Online Package Manager" menu option.

I've been using Delphi and/or Lazarus + FPC for 15 years. It's truly the most productive way to build a GUI desktop application, and makes it extremely easy to build powerful console apps.

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Sometimes I need to create a small GUI application for my Windows colleagues. Using Qt or .NET I get huge binaries/dependencies. What is the final binary size (all deps included) with your solution for a "hello world" GUI exe?

This was written a few years ago with FPC v2.2 (latest is FPC v3.2), but generally matches my experience: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Size_Matters#Analysis_of_various...

tl;dr is that if you create a RELEASE build, should be about 2 - 5mb for a GUI app, depending on the platform. And if you run `upx` against the resulting binary, it will be even smaller.

  Win 7 x64:  
  ------------  
  - 12.3 mb == Default build      
  -  3.2 mb == Default build without debug info
  -  2.1 mb == Optimized compiler
  -  2.1 mb == Optimized compiler without debug info
  
  Ubuntu x64:  
  ------------  
  - 13.4 mb == Default build     
  -  7.5 mb == Default build without debug info
  -  4.4 mb == Optimized compiler
  -  2.7 mb == Optimized compiler without debug info

Optimized compiler means:

    1. Project|Compiler Options|Code|Smart Linkable (-CX) -> Checked
    2. Project|Compiler Options|Linking|Debugging| Uncheck all except `Strip Symbols From Executable (-Xs) -> Checked`Strip Symbols From Executable (-Xs) -> Checked
    3. Project|Compiler Options|Linking|Link Style|Link Smart (-XX) -> Checked
    4. (Optional) Project|Compiler Options|Code|Optimizations|smaller rather than faster -> Checked (Warning: this might decrease performance)

I get 2.1 MB win32 and 6.9 MB Ubuntu x64 with fpc 3.2

Which is rather bad. I used to use Delphi 4 and it would create 350 KB programs by default.

Which was also bad, so I sometimes used that Delphi without the GUI designer and without the VCL, using the win32 API directly, to create 50 KB programs. That is a reasonable software size. Software keeps getting worse every year

A rather small GUI windows program with few dependencies is 1-2 MB; if you pass it through UPx (https://upx.github.io/) it will be less than 1 MB. Take a look at this program https://github.com/spapas/pdfsigner/releases/tag/v1.0 build with lazarus if you want to see how it looks like.

A sore point for me in .NET, given that Anders was on the team, was the lack of proper AOT compilation (NGEN did not really cut it), Delphi style.

We had to wait until Windows 8 to properly get it, and still its being rebooted due to the way WinRT went, whereas it could bave been there since v1.0.

https://github.com/dotnet/designs/blob/main/accepted/2020/fo...

How do third party GUI components work? Are they custom drawn? And how does that work with the various supported toolkit backends of Lazarus?

It has bindings for practically everything (Win32 UI, GTK, GTk2, GTK3, QT, OSX) and also you can custom drae yours.

It's truly the most productive way to build a GUI desktop application, and makes it extremely easy to build powerful console apps.

How does the experience compare to C#, .NET Core, and Visual Studio?

Very closely.

The original architect of Turbo Pascal is Anders Hejlsberg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg), who also was recruited to Microsoft directly by Bill Gates.

Anders went on to architect J++, the .NET Framework and C#, and TypeScript.

C# is heavily influenced by Turbo Pascal / Delphi because they have the same original architect. And Lazarus + FPC are open-source implementations of the Delphi 7 IDE + Object-Pascal language (same as Delphi).

If you are at home in Visual Studio, using Lazarus will feel very familiar.

Object-Pascal is easy to learn. A great site to bookmark when learning Delphi or Lazarus + FPC is: http://www.delphibasics.co.uk/

Do you have any references to good examples of console apps built with FreePascal?

A list of “famous” apps written in Delphi or Lazarus:

https://jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/famous-s...

Console apps? For the terminal?

The strength of Lazarus was creating Windows GUI apps not console apps..

But I made a console app with it: http://www.videlibri.de/xidel.html

A query language for HTML, XML, and JSON

Yeah I know it sounded weird but I'm not really that interested in GUI apps but I am interested in different languages. Nice project page by the way. Thanks for the link.

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