Lazarus Free Pascal RAD IDE 1.0.2 is released | Hacker News Reader

Lazarus Free Pascal RAD IDE 1.0.2 is released

lazarus.freepascal.org

45 pointsmariuz22 comments

Excuse my ignorance but what do people use Pascal for these days?

I remember learning Pascal back in middle and high school, because it was the teaching language of choice, but now that Python, Scheme and Jave have taken the title of preferred teaching language in many schools, what else is it used for? Greenfield projects or mainly maintenance of legacy code?

I'm not trying to troll here. I'm genuinely curious.

A significant part of Skype is written in pascal (Delphi) AFAIK.

Win32 apps from smaller teams often happen to be using Delphi underneath: http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Good_Quality_Applications_Built...

As a dev environment Pascal is also (unsurprisingly) quite mature; both open source and commercial tools, a decent set of libraries, and a language designed to compile with blazing speed, which with modern extensions also has power somewhere in between C and C++.

Check this live html/css/js code editor I'm working on: http://liveditor.com, it's written in Delphi, with a small part in JS. IMHO, Delphi is the best/productive native Dev tool for Windows, and it's my 'secret' weapon ;)

I would say mostly maintenance.

Although many companies rely on it, at least in Delphi's case. Delphi alongside C++ Builder are the only RAD environments that generate native code on Windows platforms, as such many people still rely on them.

Skype for Windows is partially written in Delphi.

I work on a 1.5 million line delphi codebase, developed continuously since 1996. It's legacy, but then also it's not, because delphi has allowed us to keep pace with new API's in windows. Delphi was and is a great choice if you're in it for the long haul.

Free Pascal is reasonably popular in the indie game scene.

I haven't touched Delphi in over 15 years now I think, maybe longer. But I used to be a pretty heavy user of it until Borland went Inprise.

Anyways, back when I was hot and heavy with it, I was writing audio and midi software, and I know most VST plugins from smaller to single vendors were done in Delphi. A lot of "shareware" audio apps were done with it (Fruity Loops, et al).

While Lazarus is maturing, they will never pose a strong challenge to Embarcadero.

I do not like their architecture because goes against the Delphi spirit of being platform integrative(firemonkey also violates this too but that is just a desperation move by Embarcadero). LCL eats up a lot of developer time and prevents people from contributing. The last time I looked at their bug tracker I saw tickets closed because LCL changes don't work on ancient versions of windows... and to work on LCL you really have to have domain knowledge of OSX, Win32, and GTK. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/65/LCLArchitectur...

I really wish they would have adopted Qt as their cross-platform option and then built different widgetsets for OSX, Win32, GTK, etc... LCL is fine now I guess for the IDE and for people with old delphi projects they want to port, but they really do need to create widgetsets that evolve with the underlying platform if they want to get people like this guy onboard.

http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/pipermail/lazarus/2012-O...

It's great to see Lazarus finally maturing. What used to be done in an expensive IDE costing $$$ can now be done with free open source tools. Simply amazing.

AFAIK, open source is what killed Delphi

That is plain wrong.

What killed Delphi was the mismanagement at Borland.

The changes of the languages division between Borland, Imprise, Borland again, Embarcadero and finally Codegear, made many business move away from Delphi.

In the enterprise world, many of the former Delphi users have moved into Java or .NET worlds. There are quite a few Delphi users in Europe though. Germany is quite a strong country in Delphi usage, enough to still have Delphi articles in computer magazines.

As a former Turbo Pascal fan, I find sad that Delphi usage has decayed. The language is quite good, at the same level of C and C++ (minus metaprogramming), with better type safety and native code compilers available.

The language is quite good, at the same level of C and C++ (minus metaprogramming), with better type safety and native code compilers available.

Not to mention the fact that Pascal/Delphi compilers are usually so much faster than C++ compilers. I never used Delphi much, but I can clearly see its appeal.

> What killed Delphi was the mismanagement at Borland.

... and VB and the (shift to the) Internet.

VB I doubt, at least not in the type of enterprise projects I usually work on.

You can do web development in Delphi.

Can it support latest Delphi codes? Has anyone tried the cross platform support? (Though I still love Delphi, sadly I'm now far away from it...)

When I last used Free Pascal(5+ years ago) it had a Delphi compatibility mode that worked "mostly correct" on the libraries I used. (changes needed, iirc, were minor)

Lazarus wasn't ready as an IDE at that time(lots of missing stuff, I used a text editor and the command line) but the story might be different today.

Edit: And it compiled fine on Linux!

I pretty much hate Pascal as a language but I recently used it on one of my project. I wanted a executable that would just WORK on any computer without any installation, dependency or a specific version of a .NET framework. I used Lazarus and it just worked.

is this thing called lazarus because it is bringing pascal back from the dead?

AFAIK, yes that is the case.

I have fond memories of Turbo Pascal. I'm already downloading. Thanks for this!

Me too, specially because it offered much more type safety and compile times back in the 80's that we are still struggling to recover.

If Borland had created an official standard from their Pascal dialect, maybe C wouldn't had taken off in the PC world.

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