[Lazarus] Lazarus platform "popularity contest"

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote:
> 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

Many thanks for that Felipe, I'll pass it on. If I'm reading that 
correctly there's going to be a few additional x64 users hidden in the 
Linux bucket, so the number of x64 (all OS) and MacOS (all hardware) 
users are probably fairly similar.

> 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.

Games consoles and phones are something I've never really looked at, 
although occasionally somebody asks me whether they'd be any use as the 
brain of an embedded system.

>> 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.

But would the ports that made the most money in the short term be the 
ones to keep them in business in the longer term? If for example they 
predicted lots of NintendoDS sales they'd get bitten when the platform 
became obsolete, and they could get similarly bitten if Apple continues 
to spread FUD about the degree to which "alien" languages are welcome on 
their products.

> 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?

Very true. But it's not so much who would read the raw data but whether 
it's possible to get reliable information on e.g. how many people are 
still using GTK1 when the developers decide to axe support.

> 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.

If it were the developers probably wouldn't do as fine a job :-)

> Do you really think that Microsoft reads all the dozens of millions of
> crash reports that it receives daily?

Memories of reading coredumps on music-ruled paper. On the other hand 
I'm currently chasing an intermittent termination problem in live code 
on a handful of application servers: having a million users file 
automatic reports when it happened would save me having to wait until 
the end of the year to see whether my fix has worked.

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

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