[Lazarus] Congrats to the FPC/Lazarus projects - job well done!

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi Guys,

This is just to give everybody that works on FPC or Lazarus a pat on the 
back. Seriously, you guys are doing an *excellent* job. Even though I am 
sometimes a bit hard on you guys.

Having moved back to Delphi (I'm using XE at the moment) for a 
contracting job, I got to the realization how bad Delphi has become. 
Compared to Lazarus IDE, Delphi IDE is a joke!!

[rant on]

My issues with Delphi IDE in the last two weeks:

  - Error Insight (red squiggles for Unknown Identifiers) is horribly
    broken. My code editor looks as if my 1 year old drew with a red
    marker all over the screen! More sad news - the IDE Product Manager
    of Delphi told me personally that the latest Delphi version is
    better, but there are still many false positives. Oh dear.

  - Delphi Project Manager window is useless!
    It has drag-n-drop and shows you a nice blue target drop location,
    but those are all fake features. You can't drag-n-drop units to
    reorganize your project.
    There is a kludge work-around - using F2 to rename a unit
    (but that too, only works sometimes) by giving it a relative path
    and file name. But then...
       - Delphi IDE doesn't update all references to the old units,
         in case of a unit rename.
       - Delphi IDE doesn't delete or rename the old DCU file, so
         have fun debugging code that doesn't seem to update, because
         it is silently using the old DCU file still lying around.
       - Delphi IDE doesn't sort the units after a rename. Hell,
         it's not even sorted after I restart the IDE or reload the
         project.

  - Delphi IDE is so SLOW to start up, and I'm running a beefy Intel i7
    with 32GB RAM.

  - You can't customise IDE shortcuts. What EMBT gives you is what
    you are forced to live with. I use a custom Dvorak keyboard layout,
    and many QWERTY-centric shortcuts are terrible to type using
    my keyboard layout. Lazarus allows me to customise them as needed.

  - Delphi IDE seems to randomly decide some files will contain
    BOM markers and others not. I still haven't figured out if there
    is actually any logic in the way it works.

  - Delphi compiler gives no hints on unused units.

  - Oh why is "Save Project As..." under the File menu and not the
    Project menu!

  - Delphi IDE doesn't have a keyboard shortcut for File -> Open!!!
    Have they not heard about Ctrl+O ???

  - No editor option to switch off "cursor past end of line" feature.


...and this is just the tip of the iceberg!!!

[rant off]


I promise, I'll never complain about Lazarus IDE or FPC again! :)
Long live open source development tools.


ps:
   There was ONE thing I did like about Delphi - the "File -> New ->
   XML Data Binding" option, where it generates interfaces and
   classes to work with XML data or a schema. That was pretty
   useful. Does Lazarus have something like that yet?


Regards,
   Graeme

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/

My public PGP key:  http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp