[Lazarus] Please define "delphi compatibility"

Kostas Michalopoulos badsectoracula at gmail.com
Thu Oct 4 12:36:01 CEST 2012


This discussion is derailing the thread, Lazarus was is and will
always be crossplatform with support for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and
whatever other widgetset people need and LCL will have to be designed
with crossplatform support in mind.

Platform popularity doesn't matter, it is up to the Lazarus developers
and contributors to decide that by submitting actual working code -
code "speaks" better than words.

What this thread is about and some of us want to make it clear so said
code can be better be thought and designed is the stance and exact
meaning of "Delphi compatibility". Does it mean we screw everything if
it is incompatible with Delphi? Does it mean making Delphi users'
lives easier but without compromising better solutions and if a
clearly better solution is available use that instead of Delphi's way?
Does it mean screw Delphi, any compatibility is a coincidence nowadays
due to Lazarus' past history? Does it mean something else?

Kostas "Bad Sector" Michalopoulos

On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 12:17 PM, Malcolm Buckingham <mjb at admagres.com> wrote:
>
>> > It would be interesting to know what percentage of
>> programmers using
>> > Lazarus are developing cross platform software. Unfortunately I
>> > suspect that answers obtained via this list would be skewed
>> towards multi-platform.
>>
>> However, I think that you're confusing "cross platform" with
>> "not using Delphi's supported platform(s)". My own suspicion
>> is that far more people are targeting a single platform
>> (Linux, BSD, potentially Android
>> etc.) than are seriously trying to make sure that their code
>> runs on a collection of different OSes and CPUs (with
>> different word size, endianness and alignment requirements).
>>
>
> I'm sure you are correct when you say that many people are writing for a
> single platform. If I had to write for Linux then Lazarus would be my first
> choice. The software I write is usually for controlling scientific hardware
> and then processing the data obtained. Some of the core software tends to be
> low level and difficult to write in an OS independent way. Things like
> shared memory, USB drivers, etc. Not impossible to write but definitely more
> work. Once you instrument control software is Windows based then any other
> data processing software has to run on Windows as well.
>
> I've seen other companies working in this area supporting both Windows and
> Linux only to discover that 95% of the installations were for Windows but
> customer support issues were about 50/50. In the end they dropped Linux
> support. This is nothing to do with which OS is the best, but if most of
> your customers are wedded to Windows then supporting Linux is a lot of work
> for very little gain.
>
> On the other hand things may change in the future. If Tablets really take
> off in business then maybe there will be a more even split between Windows,
> Android and Apple. Then having a cross-platform development would make a lot
> of sense.
>
> Malcolm
>
>
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