[Lazarus] Animation library

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2017-03-08 18:35, Lars via Lazarus wrote:
> When I finally get around to installing freebsd, if I can remember.

JWM runs on any X11 system... Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris etc. But yes,
FreeBSD is a brilliant choice. I much prefer it over Linux too.

> What do you do when you need to run a Windows lazarus program?

WINE, just like under Linux. Or you can run VirtualBox with a Windows
guest. This is how I test on various Windows and Linux platforms. I
don't know how any developer can not run some or other VM in this day
and age.

If you speak to Delphi developers, most of them run Delphi in a Windows
VM, using a Apple computer.

VM's also give you a lot of piece-of-mind. If your real hardware fails,
move the VM to any other system and continue where you left off - hardly
any down time. I regularly make backup copies or take snapshots of my
VM's too. Snapshots are very handy for experimentation.

Speaking of emulators, FreeBSD also includes a Linux Emulator (an actual
CentOS 6.6 install I believe), so you can run FreeBSD, Windows and Linux
applications without firing up a VM. Pretty neat!

> I'm not sure what the emulators/virtualbox's are 
> available for bsd.

VirtualBox, Xen, Bhyve, FreeBSD Jail, QEMU etc...  VMWare doesn't
support FreeBSD.  I've been using VirtualBox for about 7 years now
(headless and GUI) and it works brilliantly! Bhyve is actually part of
the base FreeBSD system now, so it's built into the operating system.


As for developing cross-platform applications, even if Windows is your
largest seller, if LCL did it's job correctly, you should be able to
develop under any platform, then simply cross-compile (or compile
natively in a VM) and things should work everywhere the same. In the
real world LCL is unfortunately not there yet, but close.

Pure fpGUI Toolkit applications have had that ability for 7+ years now.
With fpGUI I only develop personal and commercial applications under
FreeBSD, then at release time I compile binaries for other platforms and
test (obviously). Since 7+ years I've never had incompatibilities across
platforms - my applications work everywhere identical. I guess this is
just one of the many benefits of 100% custom written toolkits.

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