[Lazarus] Why lazarus is sorely needed: A plea for stability and backwards compatibility

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2017-04-20 10:02, Michael Van Canneyt via Lazarus wrote:
> Total number of downloads: well over 1500. 
> Lines of code in our app: 1900 (spread over 20 files).

That is totally insane. The worst dependency hell ever! And then one of
those dependencies get broken or discontinued and your are screwed. Plus
the fact that every 6 months web frameworks often become obsolete and
replaced by yet another crazy acronym framework.

And some people wonder why I often chose the “roll your own solution”
path - it’s to avoid such 3rd party dependencies, and making sure my
code works for years to come.

Back in my Delphi 7 days I worked for a company. The project I worked on
used something like 20 3rd party components/libraries. That project was
stuck in Delphi 7 for years and years (until the project itself became
obsolete). Why, because many of those 3rd party suppliers went out of
business after D7 and the the company simply had no way to easily break
that dependency or have access to the many 3rd party component source
code. I learned a valuable lesson at that job - keep dependencies to an
absolute minimum!


> * Keep dependencies to a minimum.

+1000


> * Object Pascal developers are spoilt
>    (or maybe they simply know what they are doing).

Indeed we are!


> Lazarus needs to be spread more.

FPC + Lazarus needs to spread more.


> The iOS and Android environments sorely need tools like Lazarus.

Definitely. Wasn't there somebody working on a mobile phone development
toolkit for Lazarus at some point (a year or two ago)? I wonder what
ever happened to that.


Regards,
  Graeme