[Lazarus] The future of the Lazarus IDE

[Marco van de Voort]

Op 2019-11-24 om 11:54 schreef Michael Van Canneyt via lazarus:
>
> It's perfectly possible to use VS Code or any other editor that uses
> web-technology for its GUI to create native apps. It doesn't matter to 
> VS Code or atom whether it calls FPC, pas2js or the TMS Web compiler.

I use Delphi, Visual Studio (2015/17), MP Lab X (which is a Netbeans 
based horror) and a bit Lazarus.

VS is quite smooth, but the differences are mostly in the details. 
Delphi is still prefered as editor, but I could get to used to VS if I 
spend some time with it. But the language choice is the main reason. And 
no having some plugins is not a solution, it just makes you a second 
tier user. If I change to VS (or whatever other IDE) I will also change 
language.

MP Lab X is the worst. Slow, extremely long startup with loading umpteen 
plugins and quite a bit of instability/non-determinism. (it is for 
embedded C targets btw). Plugins work more often NOT than they do. This 
is what I fear with VSCode. All these arguments were also made for the 
move of Microchip to Netbeans too, and they never really delivered.

Delphi actually has a very annoying bug that causes popup texts in the 
IDE to get into some loop that either require killing or restarting the 
IDE. Unbelievable for a 25 year old product that costs serious $$$.

Lazarus has very rare crashes (that it closes down unexpectedly). Fairly 
minor, my biggest beef is debugging (with popups and visualizers) is not 
up to par.

> The point is that Lazarus does not and cannot cover all aspects of a 
> typical
> larger project. Editors like VS Code and Atom can, given the huge 
> wealth of
> plugins that exist out there.

Like? For editor ? For designer? For project types?

> If we had to set up a project today to copy functionality of all Atom 
> or VS Code plugins, I probably wouldn't live long enough to see that 
> project completed.

The problem is that if you now switch from Lazarus to vscode, with that 
project probably the same would happen before all proper plugins are 
done.  There will be things not quite doable to VSCode, and in the end 
you never get on par.

>
> Lastly - but I don't know how much of an argument that is - young 
> people are
> used to sleek UIs as offered in VS Code or Atom.  The Lazarus IDE is 
> confusing to them: it's origins are clearly in the RAD era, which (so 
> I'm told) is all but abandoned today.

Conformists will never change to something that is different. Even if it 
superficially looks like it. Consider those groups lost for the most part.