[lazarus] FreeCLX and Kylix news!

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Michael A. Hess wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> Borland has given us a heads up about FreeCLX. They have placed the
> current FreeCLX source on SourceForge and have let us know so that we
> can start looking at it with regards to making Lazarus work with
> FreeCLX.
>
> However, the initial evaluation by the FPC team isn't that good. Many of
> what might be considered essential parts are missing. Other parts that
> are included will only work with Kylix. I have conveyed some of these
> concerns to M. Swindell at Borland and we will see what the response is.
> However the open source'ness and free'ness of CLX that Borland is
> proclaiming might not be as open as one would hope.

Maybe the openness only goes as far as letting people see what they do,
and hope that suggestions for improvements (in the form of patches and
code) will pour in. A common approach these days for big companies that
'go open source' :)

I would like to add a plea here:

It's not because Borland now made CLX available, that we should all of a sudden
jump on the Kylix BandWagon. The LCL has come a long way, and I think that the
focus should still be on getting the IDE to a workable state.

Adding support for CLX and other things means in this case: Make sure that
lazarus can use both the LCL class library and the CLX; This means that a
certain independent-ness of the used toolkit is needed, but since the lowest
common denominator is the Classes unit, this should not be hard.

By the time the Lazarus team gets the IDE to a point where it can be used easily,
the FPC core team should have made some progress in getting some fundamentally
missing concepts such as Variants, Multithreading and widestrings to work in
the compiler.

Without support for these things, trying to get CLX to run with Lazarus (or FPC)
is a waste of time.

Another thing is that the CLX still contains some pretty basic functionality
failures, which I hope Borland will fix soon.

In short: The LCL and IDE should still be the primary goal for Lazarus.

Michael.