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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

For me the only reason to use pascal is GUI apps but this doesn't have it.

You can use Lazarus from a C interface - via liblcl. There are bindings for Go and Nim that use this method. Given the QBE backend, this may be one possible route for Blaise but needs investigation.

I have not used Pascal, but things that appeal to me (other than GUI apps) are that it seems simple to learn, and is readable, fast and compiles fast.

What languages would be better in these ways?

Forth could make a case for "faster" in compilation, at least, since it's aggressively machine-level(in a traditional assembly-up bootstrapped system) but blends a mix of interpreted and compiled. Readable and fast in the real-world cases, OTOH, is a matter of taste and engineering practice. I'm doing hobby Forth and it's a blast - it starts off as a crude load-and-store Fortran-like language, and gradually evolves as you stumble into new idioms. If I had to work with a team, I would probably yearn for a Pascal where some bureaucratic boundaries exist on what can be done.

Thanks, that sounds interesting. I learned a tiny bit for Forth for fun a long time ago but no one else seems to use it and it does not seem to have much of an ecosystem so it looks like its only for niche hobby projects? What sort of projects do you use it for?

fpGUI Toolkit will be made to work with Blaise.

[1] Homepage (terrible looking): https://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ [2] Github repo: https://github.com/graemeg/fpGUI/ The Discussion area has some interesting conversations and screenshots.

Congratulations on your projects, Graeme! When Blaise gets an IDE, make sure the editor component is modern, pleasant to work with (like vscode, for example) and with proper support for fonts. All things that Lazarus missed.

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