[Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?

[lyh1]

> Date: Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:11:05 +0200
> From: Graeme Geldenhuys <graemeg.lists at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Lazarus] Is Lazarus project in a downward spiral?
> To: Lazarus mailing list <lazarus at lists.lazarus.freepascal.org>
> Message-ID: <4B94CD39.90500 at opensoft.homeip.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Marc Weustink het geskryf:
>> I don't count you as the average lazarus user. And you clearly didn't
>> pickup the numerous incompatibility complains here, or the bugtracker or
>> on the forum.
>
> Porting a component to a new development tool chain like Lazarus should
> mean making the component platform independent. With that comes the 
> removal
> of Win API calls from the old component to the new - this should be quite
> logical. If the said developer wants to use Win API calls in a Linux or 
> Mac
> apps, they have no business in developing cross-platform applications.

I have a little word here, in a encapsulation, user should avoid touching 
low level things.
But for M$ environment, they have many features that is correlate with 
winapi.

I am a wince widget user, and happy that LCL remain the window handle for 
winapi compatibility.
So  I don't need to dig to underlay of  LCL and uncover those low level 
things in order to use OS Specific features, like DirectDraw, D3D.
I just reuse lcl and make some code around the handle and thing go smooth.

I have use undelphix years ago, and they just encap all D2D/D3D surface and 
make them untouchable on user level.
When I want to add some low level feather Like the Fixed pipeline line that 
it don't provide,
I have a hard time on digging the underlay code and uncover those  D2D/D3D 
surface so I can add my feather for my propose.

May be for Mac/ Linux user, you just think the windows handle there is some 
thing useless, but it actually help people on other platform.

To make a decision of removing some OS specific feature, may be the best way 
to thing is what kind of user you are serving for.
If the target is Delphi user, surely winapi specific thing is a must have. 
Because Delphi user most likely is windows user. And LCL add cross platform 
value on top of VCL.
Otherwise, there are Java, C they have much more nice library to use why use 
FPC/LCL?

>
>
>> porting other delphi app a lot easier. So please shut up if you don't
>> know where you talking about.
>
> No idea where that came from... but very nice Marc.
>
>
> Regards,
>  - Graeme -
>
> -- 
> fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
> http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/
>
>
>