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Comment by c0l0 | Hacker News Reader

PeaZip is great software, and doubly so because it is written using Lazarus and compiled with Free Pascal. I highly recommend giving it a try, if only to experience that high quality software can be built using tools that lead you somewhat off the beaten path.

Unfortunately, its lead developer has recently posted[0] that he has to undergo what seems to be complicated, major eye surgery, and that he will probably be unable to continue development :(

[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/PeaZip/comments/1bn7pu0/communicati...

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Somewhat related: GID (for Generic Image Decoder) is written in Ada and significantly outperforms ImageMagick (written in C) in some benchmarks.

https://gautiersblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/benchmarking-gener...

Seems like he's doing OK, thank goodness! https://old.reddit.com/r/PeaZip/comments/1cpdvum/peazip_980_...

Neither the existence of this link nor anything in it contradicts the developer's earlier post. It looks like the situation was inaccurately summarized by the HN user with the top comment here—the PeaZip developer didn't announce that he or she was going to stop working on PeaZip.

> Drag & drop from app to system is certainly a mayor usability boost, but it is not simple to implement as it requires a dedicated solution for each supported OS and desktop environment.

Off topic, but this is why many devs choose electron.

> and desktop environment

Off topic, but this is why many devs choose not to support Linux. Every distro is its own special snowflake

That's just not true; I've been using the relatively obscure Void Linux for almost 10 years, and rarely have distro-specific issues, including with Linux-native games from gog.com. Nor do people report distro-specific issues in software I develop on Void.

And it's doubly not true for something like drag-and-drop, which exists on the Desktop Environment level rather than distro level.

> Off topic, but this is why many devs choose not to support Linux. Every distro is its own special snowflake

most DE use the same standards (dbus etc) so no

I like seeing software written in Free Pascal, they tend to be small and performant. Cheat Engine[0] is another example.

[0] https://github.com/cheat-engine/cheat-engine

I searched around and found this tutorial[0] on the official wiki. Seems like a decent intro to the history & syntax of the language. There’s also another tutorial[1] on the more modern iteration of the language, as well as some video tutorials[2] on using the IDE for GUI development.

[0]: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Basic_Pascal_Tutorial/Introducti...

[1]: https://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal

[2]: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_videos

Yeah, PeaZip is the best example of what Lazarus is capable of, if you feel like using it.

I remember back in my Pascal-loving days, especially after the .NET release of VB, looking at PeaZip+Lazarus and being inspired.

+100 for Lazarus and FreePascal

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