[Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?

[Thierry Coq]

Marco van de Voort wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 06:46:56PM +0100, Thierry Coq wrote:
>   
>> This doesn't solve the issue on when this bug will be corrected, what 
>> path will it take, who can correct or test the correction, etc. The 
>> casual (would-be) contributor such as myself seems excluded and not 
>> really wanted. This is a perception that I have, unwillingly.
>>     
>
> From?
>   
This list, for example.
>  
>   
>> For the moment, Lazarus is enough for my prototyping, and I'm waiting 
>> for a stable, 1.0 version. Until then, there is no chance as a 
>> professional developer that I could recommend this tool, although it 
>> shows great promise. In the meantime, I develop a few components, 
>> testing such issues such as COM/DCOM and dynamic loading of libraries, 
>>     
>
> COM is getting better, slowly (noticable in 2.5.1, but still not perfect,
> specially wrt exceptions. Will be in FPC 2.6 at the earliest).
>   
Yes, I'm very happy about that. It's already possible to work with COM, 
although the coding is a manual activity. I've done a COM interface to 
Excel which works quite nicely.
> I don't see any big development (or interest from _contributing_ users) in
> dynamic libraries. (and there are many pitfalls and multiplatform gotcha's
> here. There is not even a good inventorisation what should work how). So
> unless somebody is going to invest major amounts of times, I don't see this
> happening in say the coming two years _AT LEAST_.
>   
Yes, the effort is probably large. The Lazarus team has done the same 
multi-platform miracle for GUIs, so it could be done. I know for a fact 
dynamic loading can be done in some cases, as I have done preliminary 
testing on the subject and have demonstrated it can be done (manually) 
with the current environment. It could be possible at least to be able 
to load packages compiled with the same version (of FPC and Lazarus). 
The principle of one code, compiling for each platform could be 
applicable here, too.

I completely agree that loading packages built with other compilers than 
FPC would much more arduous. So maybe there is a staged path to add this 
feature.

So there would be limits and caveats, but it would still be a great 
feature of Lazarus in its effort to be compatible with Delphi.
> More importantly though, most of this are FPC features, and not Lazarus so
> unrelated to Lazarus 1.0 or not.
>   
No, I don't believe dynamic packages is only a FPC feature. Being able 
to dynamically load components in the IDE without recompiling would be a 
great improvement in FPC, as well as implementing one of the oldest 
features of Delphi. It would also allow people like me, users of Lazarus 
and builders of components to have a more external view away from the 
internals of Lazarus, and maybe create an ecosystem for lazarus components.

Also being able to load dynamically packages would be a great benefit 
for creating easily configurable or extensible applications.

Don't take my constructive wishes for Lazarus improvements for anything 
worse than what they are: I'm very happy that Lazarus exists, and I try 
to use it as much as possible. I wish to thank the core team for this 
great piece of work!
>
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