[Lazarus] [OT] New "free" IDE from Trolltech

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

2008/11/2 Mac Programmer <MacPgmr at fastermac.net>:
> 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.

This is definitely not the case with our company. We have rewritten
our flagship product, moving away from Delphi 7 and VB 6 to only using
Free Pascal. We have also started a few other projects, again all of
them only using Free Pascal.  FPC and the Lazarus IDE is now the
development tools we have standardised on.

> - 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.

As far as we (our company) are concerned, we are not interested in
.NET at all. That's one of the reasons we moved away from Delphi
(because that's all that CodeGear was interested in). We do not see
the point in having to install a 120MB runtime, simply to run a single
little application. Plus having to install multiple versions of the
.NET runtime as they come out. We want to target multiple platforms
and easy deployment - and anything other than Windows is not
guaranteed to have a .NET runtime installed. Not even all Windows
systems have .NET installed (we still have plenty of users running old
systems with Win98 on)  Also at the time, the future of Mono was doggy
and WinForms didn't exist yet for Mono, though it seems to have
settled and improved a bit now.

Saying that, native apps are all we are interested in at the moment.
If gives us the best performance and it's easy to deploy on any
system.

> - Possible integration with the big IDE's.

There is nothing wrong with the Lazarus IDE as far as I can see.  To
me, it's even better than Delphi IDE. Plus it's really easy to extend
and alter if you don't like something or found a bug. No more having
to wait two years for the next release, and having to pay a fortune
for it. Plus the actual people using the tool (developers) can guide
it's future - not some marketing team simply worrying about the bottom
line.


Regards,
  - Graeme -


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