An unfortunate name for this software, in light of "the Lazarus Group," a State-sponsored hacking arm of North Korea.
As in, Pascal was all but dead (tha Java hype was happening with full force) and even the Delphi guys put their best efforts into making Delphi a C++ dialect, but this RAD IDE would resurect Pascal.
In what way is Delphi a C++ dialect?
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder
There's now some Python support too:
From Turbo Pascal 5.5 onwards, the language slowly adopted C++ features, while giving them a Pascal flavour.
Class accessors, generics, const variables, construction/destruction, value based OOP, virtual methods are some of those influences.
When Borland rebooted the product line into Delphi and C++ Builder, they got symbiotic.
In Delphi you can easily use libraries written in C++ Builder, and vice versa, while C++ Builder provides a similar GUI RAD experience.
Modern Delphi does Linux just fine.
Delphi's VCL is tied to much to the Windows API to work without it.
Even Lazarus implements a lot of Windows API like functions. E.g. you call one of these functions on Linux and it converts it to a corresponding gtk/qt function call: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/lazarus/lazarus/-/blob/mai...
But it is all less reliable because the Lazarus community is much smaller than the Wine community
Where Turbo Pascal 5.5. was basically the adoption of Object Pascal extensions from Apple.
So when Borland rebooted it into Delphi it already had 4 Turbo Pascal releases (5.5, 6.0, 7.0, 1.5 Windows) having such inspiration.
Ironically, while everyone is trying to reinvent the wheel how to interop with C++, Delphi and C++ Builder have been doing it for decades, with .NET and Objective-C++ being followers on that front.
Best of all, is that it allows for C++ like programming, with security belt on by default, but as usual the industry is full of left turns.
"One of the original projects that made an attempt to build a Delphi clone was Megido. However this effort died. Lazarus as you know was the biblical figure that was raised from the dead by Christ. Soooooo. The project is named Lazarus as it was started/raised from the death of Megido."