[lazarus] Lazarus-project

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Thu, 27 Jun 2002 12:11:31 +0200 (CEST)
JOSSE.COLPAERT at student.kuleuven.ac.be wrote:

> Dear Lazarus team, 
> 
> Being interested in the Lazarus project, I want to study the source code and
> hope to contribute some time myself. 

Great.

 
> Having started now, I wrote a document about what I already know in order to be
> useful to other starters and also in order to ask you for how to proceed.  I
> attached it in this mail in KWord/HTML format.  

I like your idea to explain, what can be found in what file. But I think, your description of lazarus.pp is too detailed. This is a good introduction to an LCL program. But I think, people who wants to help improving the IDE will probably know basic lcl programs.
Some ideas how to proceed: 
- write an overview of the classes (location and short description)
- write comments for methods and variables


> Some questions still arise for me: 
> 
> - What's the status of the LCL itself?  Is that stable?  Is it exactly Delphi's?  

The LCL is OS- and widget-independent. Delphi's VCL has some win32 specific parts (e.g. images, clipboard). But the LCL tends to provide nearly the same API as the VCL. Internally it maps everything to the widget interfaces. The gtk interface is usable, although there are some bugs left. The win32 interface can already be used for simple applications, but the IDE for example does not run yet. The gtk2 interface will be started soon. The qt interface is outdated, since we have no developer for it.
So, the LCL as whole is not stable, but most components are.


> - What parts of Lazarus are developed in Lazarus itself?  

Nearly everything. I'm developing lazarus exclusively with lazarus.


Mattias