<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Probably what you're seeing here in the RemObjects/Codegear deal is evidence of larger trends taking place in the software industry:<div><br></div><div>(1) Continued consolidation, like in most industries. Codegear and RemObjects both probably concluded that their .NET products were going nowhere fast in a market dominated by VB.NET/C#, so they figured joining up might help both of them.</div><div><br></div><div>(2) Continued standardizing on the dominant IDE's for most large organizations, that is on Visual Studio, Eclipse or maybe XCode if you're doing serious Mac work. This also frees up the compiler and tool developers from having to do an IDE for their products.</div><div><br></div><div>(3) Continued mainstreaming of .NET as a development platform. I'm seeing contracts and proposals now that require .NET.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Not sure if I understand the animosity toward Codegear. Without Delphi, this site wouldn't exist. Codegear's new owners seem eminently practical and pragmatic with deals like this.</div><div><br></div><div>It appears, though, that with this deal we've lost the free command-line Oxygene Pascal compiler. It worked great with both .NET on Windows and Mono on, say, OS X (see <a href="http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Using_Pascal_Libraries_with_.NET_and_Mono">http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Using_Pascal_Libraries_with_.NET_and_Mono</a>).</div><div><br></div><div>Here's an odd page I happened upon by accident when googling for something else:</div><div><br></div><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Porting_Delphi_Clients_to_the_XO">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Porting_Delphi_Clients_to_the_XO</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">This is somehow related to the One Laptop Per Child project, which uses Linux, hence the need for Lazarus. What it tells me is that Lazarus and Free Pascal are still seen as useful, but primarily for use with legacy Delphi projects, not necessarily with new projects. In light of above trends, does it make sense to talk about how Lazarus and Free Pascal move into the future? For example, some projects I've worked on lately could definitely benefit from things like this:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">- A version of SWIG that supports Object Pascal syntax, so we could create Python (and possibly other) interfaces to our classes, not just to generic C-type functions.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">- A .NET strategy. I'm not suggesting a compiler that produces .NET assemblies, but rather some way to use our classes with .NET, maybe by wrapping them in a .NET assembly.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">- Possible integration with the big IDE's.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Thanks.</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-Phil</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><br></div></div></div></body></html>