[Lazarus] The future of the Lazarus IDE

[Andreas Schneider]

Am 2019-11-23 11:12, schrieb Michael Van Canneyt via lazarus:
> This will mean that soon, you'll be able to do full stack development
> in VS
> Code using object pascal. (or any other language, since VS Code is
> language agnostic)

While VS Code is an impressive editor, it is still not an IDE. There is
a reason why Visual Studio is still going, and why JetBrains is keeping
growing.

I use VS Code (or Sublime Text, which is a lot faster) for small code
edits in Go, TypeScript and JavaScript, but for bigger refactorings or
analysis, nothing beats WebStorm, GoLand, IntelliJ, etc.

IMHO, you cannot replace a full features IDE like Lazarus with VS Code.
You could, however, replace it with an IDE built on IntelliJ - their
platform has proven again and again (PyCharm, CLion, GoLand, etc.) that
they can deal with basically any language. Give that thing a proper UI
designer and you even have the ability to create desktop applications.
Too bad no one ever integrated Qt or Gtk (designer) into it.

I-Pascal (http://www.siberika.com/) is kinda going there, at least for
basic stuff. If (and that's a really big "if") you intend to leverage
existing tooling to (re)build an IDE which has more than just web
development in mind, consider JetBrains' IntelliJ platform as a base. I
guess once you tought it how to properly parse the language, you get a
lot of code tools stuff out of the box. Basically leaving you with the
form designer.

Btw. for me, personally, Lazarus (and the VCL) still beat any other
desktop UI frameworks out there. I found none that is nearly as
convenient to use and I still use it regularly to build desktop (tool)
applications that I want to be cross platform.
My stack is: Go for backend, JS/TS for web frontend and Lazarus/FPC for
desktop. I don't have any clear contender for native mobile apps yet,
though. May go (hehe) with Go (gioui) there.