[lazarus] Free IDE?

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 29 Sep 1999, Baeseman, Cliff wrote:

> I will not discount looking at it because it is java. But I tend to agree
> with you. I have tried to write some stuff with Java I like the language. It
> is a very elegant model. But the performance sucks so bad it will not be of
> use to me until everyone has a pc that runs in the 2 gigahertz range. "then
> it will be as fast as C++ code running on a 486 now"

Exactly. This is because it's interpreted, and I don't believe interpreted
systems are useful for large projects. Hence my reparm

> 
> Now tell me the kaylix model or whatever does not already sound like our
> stuff. Knowing what I know about writing on linux if borland can pull off a
> mid 2000 release I will be shocked. Maybe they could do it if they did not
> have to interface with X Windows. X throws in a totally unique set of
> challenges.

It is also my opinion, and that of the entire Free Pascal team, that they
will have a really hard time getting it to run on Linux by that time.
But then, Borland is a professional company, with capable people so...

I do believe that the kassandra team will be able to get a rudimentary IDE
with designer up and running by the end of this year, though. As far as I know
Sebastian Guenther has the component streaming basically working, the typinfo
unit should be bug-free by now, and he has a binary to text converter for
streamed objects, so you can import Delphi forms. The rest should be pretty
straightforward.

By that time I also plan to have a first working version of TDataset in the FCL,
so... seems pretty much like a 'RAD for any developer' to me ?

Competition gets stiff :-)

> 
> Borland also teamed up with Corel that means that a QT implementation is
> what I figure they are going for.

I wouldn't bet on it. There are serious problems with that approach, although it
may technically be the preferred one (hell, I would prefer to write a VCL on top
of Qt as well, only Free Pascal doesn't allow C++ objects yet), but the study I
made shows that this leads to serious problems with e.g. C++ exceptions and so
on. Also, don't forget that Object pascal doesn't allow you to declare a C++
object.

In Free Pascal we plan to do support for something like:

TQtObject = Cppclass
   MyField : TMyClass;
   Constructor Create;
   end;

so you can declare and create an object of type TQtObject. if you don't have
this you can not instantiate Qt objects yourself, unless you use some C code
to do it for you.

But this is for after version 1.0 (which we're trying to get out ASAP, BTW).

> QT has a more object based model C++ based
> than GTK which is programmed flatter. I do wish to stay with GTK because we
> cannot support QT on windows. Troll Tech charges like a 1000 dollars a seat
> for a windows version QT now that really sucks. 
> 
> This eliminates the QT widget set for anything open source and cross
> platform.

Not true, I thought you could get the widget set for free, but not the source ?
I may be wrong, however. I'd need to check the new licensing model.

Michael.