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albertzeyertoday at 12:40 PM4 repliesview on HN

Why would anyone use that over Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)?


Replies

OCTAGRAMtoday at 1:04 PM

Lazarus does not support BPL. Android and iOS support are under question. Free Pascal devs for many years did not look into Ada, and looked into C++ more, and that made Free Pascal ugly. Delphi did not look into Ada either, but they looked into .NET instead, and that made Delphi not as great, but better than Free Pascal. Anything is better than C++. Delphi delivered controlled types, that was IIRC for many years in top 10 feature requests on Quality Central, until QC was purged. They call it "managed records".

Delphi has got inline const syntax. They talk about inline var, but from my Ada programming experience inline const is the real game changer. When there was only local variable block, some stuff was assigned inside loop. This stuff was assigned once per iteration, but since variable is declared outside the loop, it is considered variable. Now, when inside loop, it can be assigned once and made read-only. I have some doubts that Free Pascal is up-to-date with these changes.

Hi-DPI. Did not test, but questionable that Free Pascal got it right.

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pjmlptoday at 12:42 PM

The IDE experience, they are the ones driving the language evolution, FreePascal follows, and the industry that cares about Object Pascal, usually only cares because of Delphi.

Don't get me wrong, FreePascal is great, but it hardly has a presence at big corporations.

If they no longer use Delphi, means they have long moved into either Java or .NET.

FooBarWidgettoday at 12:42 PM

How good is Lazarus nowadays? Haven't taken a look for 20 years so this is a genuine question.

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FpUsertoday at 2:04 PM

I use both for desktop applications but as an IDE and for debugging in particular Lazarus is behind Delphi.