[Lazarus] Multi-Device Designer

[Michael Schnell]

On 02/25/2015 11:49 AM, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> I honestly don't know what LCL-CustomDrawn is targeting. It also isn't 
> in a usable state at the moment and still needs a lot of development 
> before it is usable. 
AFAIK, CustomDrawn is trying to restrict the necessary functionality of 
an external WidgetSet to as little objects as possible and build up all 
GUI elements from this in Delphi code.
>> Do you see a real advantage with FireMonkey ?
> Well, considering that VCL is _very_ Windows specific,
IMHO the LCL proves that close to all VCL features can be done as good 
(or even better) with other Widgets sets than just "Windows".
> Delphi needed
> something different to target other platforms. FireMonkey toolkit was
> their ticket.  CLX could also have been their answer (as Qt runs on
> pretty much every platform out there), but Borland/CodeGear/EMB long
> forgot about CLX.
Borland failed with trying to port the VCL with Kylix, but IMHO Lazarus 
does an excellent job with the same task.
>
>> In fact, AFAIK, the FM library once was a freely available library that
>> should be usable with fpc.
> I'm pretty sure FMX now uses many Delphi specific features that wouldn't
> make it compilable with FPC any more.
I can't think of any language features that would make this necessary. 
Did they update the X86 compiler greatly making it decently incompatible 
to fpc ?

> I also don't know (but would like
> to find out) if Delphi includes full source code of FMX - in case
> somebody wanted to try and do a personal port to FPC.
I once found the source code of the original library (before bought by 
Embarcadero). I'm not sure if I saved it. But of course they tried to 
remove it from the Internet after they changed the license.

-Michael