[Lazarus] Performance of GTK 2 and CE

Mark Morgan Lloyd markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk
Wed Nov 12 11:21:16 CET 2008


Aleš Katona wrote:
 > Now don't get me wrong.. there's nothing wrong on going to
 > other solutions (even ones which have cost as products) if
 > your situation warrants it. I have also sometimes used
 > different solutions where time didn't permit to fix the
 > various FPC/Lazarus problems (for commercial projects).
 >
 > What I don't like is when people try to sort of "blackmail"
 > their problems into attention by statements like you did before
 > regarding "we'll be forced to go elsewhere". This isn't a
 > demand driven development model, bugs are fixed on personal
 > mood/itch basis, not on someone "customer" needs (although
 > majority and critical bugs obviously get more attention).
 >
 > So if you think your money/time is best spent elsewhere, fine,
 > but don't make a crybaby out of the decision. If you decide to
 > stay and help with the problem then even better of course :)
 >
 > NOTE: opinions here are my own

Fair enough, but I think that puts me in a position that I need to state 
my policy and that of the people I work for and with.

My policy is that I would prefer to build up enough competence in 
Lazarus and FPC to be able to make a worthwhile contribution to them.

Our policy is that we don't want to be forced into supplying equipment 
and services to our customers which carry unfavourable technical and 
contractual baggage. Roughly translated, we don't want to embed MS OSes 
in x86 kit unless it really is inevitable :-)

We need to eat, and if it gets to the point where the time I'm putting 
into dragging myself painfully up the learning curve prevents me from 
doing concrete development and system management that is going to be a 
problem. Fortunately I don't think we're particularly near that, but I 
regularly find that "real work" intervenes in things that are far more 
interesting and knocks me offline for days or weeks.

I think you are being slightly unfair characterising Lazarus, and by 
extension other open-source projects, as being driven entirely by 
goodwill rather than by enlightened self-interest. The bottom line is 
that we like Pascal-style languages, we value the integrated design and 
debugging that Delphi championed in its days of glory, and for a whole 
lot of reasons we want those facilities on platforms that Borland never 
took seriously.

Now I'm trying to do my bit keeping things going on SPARC, in part 
because it's a representative non-x86 architecture so is worth attention 
but also because- at present- it's comparatively easy to get SPARC-based 
systems which go rather larger than x86-based.

Finally, I would thank you not to mis-quote me. You claim that I wrote 
"we'll be forced to go elsewhere". I did not write that, what I put was 
"I'm in a position where I find myself wondering whether I should start
looking at C# or possibly Embarcadero's current offering" which I think 
is fair comment. We should all be doing that now and again, not so much 
to try to woo new "customers" but simply to ensure that there was not 
some much-appreciated and easy-to-implement facility which was being 
overlooked.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]



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