[Lazarus] Impossible to debug with Lazarus IDE

[Marc Weustink]

Probably what you're seeing here in the RemObjects/Codegear deal is  
evidence of larger trends taking place in the software industry:

(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.

(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.

(3) Continued mainstreaming of .NET as a development platform. I'm  
seeing contracts and proposals now that require .NET.


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.

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 http:// 
wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Using_Pascal_Libraries_with_.NET_and_Mono).

Here's an odd page I happened upon by accident when googling for  
something else:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Porting_Delphi_Clients_to_the_XO

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:

- 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.

- 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.

- Possible integration with the big IDE's.

Thanks.

-Phil

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