[Lazarus] Lazarus platform "popularity contest"

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 6:21 PM, Mark Morgan Lloyd
<markMLl.lazarus at telemetry.co.uk> wrote:
> Does anybody have any current figures as to the relative popularity of
> Lazarus on different CPUs and OSes?

There you go, I have put the Source Forge statistics in a table:

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/User:Sekelsenmat#Lazarus_and_Free_Pascal_usage_statistics_from_Source_Forge

The only surprise for me was Nintendo DS. wow, it has a lot of
downloads, and then people didn't upgrade much to the latest FPC. It
seams that development for game consoles also attracts a huge number
of developers, but those consoles only live a couple of years, so when
they become obsolete you need to start over.

> I'm watching a discussion elsewhere where people are speculating on whether
> Delphi will support x64 and/or the Mac in finite time, and knowing what
> Lazarus users are running could be interesting input.

Embarcadero already knows which ports would make the most money (not
necessarely the ones with most downloads), and they already started
working on both x64 and Mac. The problem seams to be when/if they will
be able to release a working product with these features.

> How many people get Lazarus (on any platform) and try it out without joining the mailing list or commenting on a project forum? Of
> these, how many drop it because they have a problem compiling a project? How can we find out where the problem areas are,
> without getting feedback from these anonymous users?

About getting usage statistics from anonymous users, I don't think we
will be doing that, because it would be a maintenance problem to keep
a server running to receive that data and then who would read it?
Helping people which contribute something (even if their time to ask
questions in the forum) already makes at least me busy enough, so that
there is no time to help anonymous people. Lazarus/FPC isn't a huge
company with 100s of developers and 10os of quality assurances running
around all day working only on that.

Note that for many companies anonymous users actually contribute,
because often they also pay, so that's why those companies try to
support them. Not to mention that a lot of those statistics sending
might actually be only psycological. Do you really think that
Microsoft reads all the dozens of millions of crash reports that it
receives daily? How much time would it take to find reproducible steps
for each of them only based in a memory dump and some lines written by
the user? Even with real bug reports it is often hard enough to figure
out what is going on, and you need further feedback. For an operating
system even worse, as often the problem could be related to a specific
hardware and so on. How many QAs would they need to do that? 100.000?
lol! So don't beliave too much on that data sending ;)

-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho