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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

There is an open source implementation: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

I don't see it getting wide adoption, but it's not bad for open source. But compared with C# (which is basically Delphi as it should originally have been, by the same designer) - nah.

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Viral expansion of any tool depends on (pardon the pandemic reference) a super spreader event or 10. Success needs: 1 A killer app. Pascal/Turbo Pascal, Email/nascent Internet, VisiCalc/Apple II, 123/IBM PC. 2 decade long over night success like Python

I acquired my "10K hour" badge with Pascal in the late 70s (CDC Cyber 6600) and Mid 80s (PC) and then again with Perl (late 80s to early 2Ks) when each of these peaked. Coming back to the 2015+ versions (Lazarus / Perl 5.24+) of both was nostalgic but the communities were in the backwaters of programming due to viral success of some many others.

A compelling event would have to happen to elevate them again. It could happen: Something pushed Ada to almost triple its "popularity" ( to < 1%.) According to PYPL (https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html) in the last year.

> I don't see it getting wide adoption

It will get it, eventually. It can produce native executables without cross compiling on ARM systems too, which is a huge selling point to me. Think Raspberry PI, other small ARM boards, etc. and the PinePhone too.

https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=52217.0

C# does not compile to native apps by default unless you're using dotnet core or whatever it is called. Powerful language sure, but there is definitely a bit of a divide between the languages just because of that even if they have a similar syntax and high level design

Just wanted to add that as a total newbie to Free Pascal, I used Lazarus and enjoyed it very much.

I still remain a total newbie but that's not because of Lazarus.

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