[Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Graeme Geldenhuys
<graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote
> Then take a look inside the XXXXwinapih.inc and see all the methods
> that must be implemented by each backend widgets. Those methods uses
> Win32 API types like HDC, WHND, HBITMAP, GDIObject, HGDIOBJ, HHOOK
> etc... All those types mean nothing to Qt, GTK1, GTK2, Cocoa, Carbon,
> fpGUI

You would need to map all those widgetsets to something anyway, so
mapping a part of them to WinAPI routines is not a big difference. The
winapi is very well documented and their docs can be easily found with
google.

While starting the qt widgetset these winapi routines weren't at all
an obstacle, they were no problem for the port.

The greatest problem I had was lack of documentation about how each
thing needs to be implemented, but I started a guide on that here:
http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/LCL_Internals

IMHO your objection to the design is based on a very superficial view.

Just to reinforce: As I explained the user shouldn't have to care
about that, all features should have LCL-style API offered as well, so
the WinAPI are only for interface developers and for people porting
from Delphi, and I don't see them as a problem for widgetset
developers as you would need to map to something alien to the
widgetset anyway.

-- 
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho