

Lazarus Free Pascal RAD IDE 1.0.2 is released  - mariuz
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,18538.0.html

======
malandrew
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.

~~~
chipsy
Win32 apps from smaller teams often happen to be using Delphi underneath:
[http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Good_Quality_Applications_Built...](http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Good_Quality_Applications_Built_With_Delphi)

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++.

------
hugh4life
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...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/65/LCLArchitecture.png)

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...](http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/pipermail/lazarus/2012-October/077000.html)

------
jamesu
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.

~~~
johnx123-up
AFAIK, open source is what killed Delphi

~~~
pjmlp
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.

~~~
ExpiredLink
> What killed Delphi was the mismanagement at Borland.

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

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

You can do web development in Delphi.

------
johnx123-up
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...)

~~~
chipsy
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!

------
dan_sim
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.

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

~~~
tomjen3
AFAIK, yes that is the case.

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

~~~
pjmlp
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.

