Linked by Joost van der Sluis on Mon 10th Sep 2007 16:03 UTC
Recently, Free Pascal (FPC) version 2.2.0 was released. This open source Pascal compiler has - since its initial release in 1993 - grown to be one of the most sophisticated open source compilers available today. Daily, more programmers discover FPC and develop their applications in Object Pascal. Specifically, the development of Lazarus has contributed to this phenomenon: Lazarus is a graphical open source IDE for FPC, with an extensive tool kit to design graphical (GUI) applications.
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RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by Hiev on Mon 10th Sep 2007 17:16
in reply to "How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
Member since:2005-09-27
You can compile Lazarus to use GTK2.
oh, and Lazarus tries to copy the VCL and it really bugsme, they should have worked on a independent multiplatform style GUI like wxWidgets instead of trying to clone the VCL, don't get me wrong, VCL is the best productivity toolkit around for Win32 programing, but is not really designed to be multiplatform (no, Kylix doesn't count), it is more dessigned to work with the Windows API.
There is a project that is trying to make it possible:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fpgui/
Edited 2007-09-10 17:24
RE[2]: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by ggeldenhuys on Tue 11th Sep 2007 07:42
in reply to "RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
Member since:2006-11-13
That's correct. fpGUI doesn't try and be VCL compatible and talks directly to the underlying Windowing System. Which means any fpGUI based application has no dependencies on large 3rdParty libraries like GTK1 or GTK2 does. Which makes application deployment a breeze!
fpGUI now also has a Visual Form Designer to speed up your development.
RE[2]: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by marcovtje on Tue 11th Sep 2007 11:26
in reply to "RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
Member since:2007-09-10
Lazarus has years of experience of porting the VCL to GTK. It is suitable enough. The nice part is the ease that people can use the native widgetset (GDI,GTK,Carbon) to improve the (OS specific) behaviour of the app, and mix OS independant with dependant components.
This avoids a bit the "lowest common denomitor" problem that a portable widget set has.
RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by dr_evil on Mon 10th Sep 2007 18:41
in reply to "How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
Member since:2006-09-01
RE[2]: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by WiggetyWhack on Mon 10th Sep 2007 22:18
in reply to "RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
RE[2]: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by marcovtje on Tue 11th Sep 2007 11:27
in reply to "RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
Member since:2007-09-10
RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by fbarns on Mon 10th Sep 2007 22:10
in reply to "How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
Member since:2007-09-10
RE[2]: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by FooBarWidget on Mon 10th Sep 2007 22:18
in reply to "RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
Member since:2005-11-11
RE[2]: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by memson on Tue 11th Sep 2007 09:44
in reply to "RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
Member since:2006-01-01
> Delphi uses anchors for sizeable dialogs
Correct. It also has the "align" property, and has so since version 1. It is a bit unweildy (just as it can be with any resizable container that is aligned to a specific "area" of another container), but it's workable.
> .Net uses the same concept just with a different name ("dock").
Wrong. This is called "anchor" in dotNet. It works exactly as the Delphi version does too.
RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by WiggetyWhack on Mon 10th Sep 2007 22:19
in reply to "How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
RE[2]: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by FooBarWidget on Mon 10th Sep 2007 22:35
in reply to "RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
Member since:2005-11-11
RE: How good is Lazarus/FPC?
by ggeldenhuys on Tue 11th Sep 2007 07:46
in reply to "How good is Lazarus/FPC?"
Member since:2006-11-13
The VCL is nice for mostly-fixed layout GUIs, but horrible for resizable dialogs because of the lack of sizers ala GTK and wxWidgets. Delphi 7 still suffers from this problem.
The LCL and VCL gets around this with a feature called Anchors. The LCL's anchors are a lot more flexible (better) than Delphi's ones.
BTW: The fpGUI project also features Anchors and should have Layout Managers (like Java or Qt) real soon.
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Member since:
2005-11-11
How good is Lazarus today? I was very interested in its development back in 2000-2002, partially because Kylix utterly failed. But then I learned C and GTK and kinda never looked back. I visited the Lazarus website from time to time, but their screenshots are severely outdated: they're still showing GTK 1 screenshots in 2007! This made me think that their development has halted or is very very slow.
Does the LCL still imitate the VCL or did they also add new things? The VCL is nice for mostly-fixed layout GUIs, but horrible for resizable dialogs because of the lack of sizers ala GTK and wxWidgets. Delphi 7 still suffers from this problem.
It's a shame to read that generics/template support is still in development. I think that any serious modern statically typed OO programming language should support generics/templates. Don't make me think back of the days when I had to write 3 different list classes just because I want to store different data types in it without requiring clients to cast return values.
Edited 2007-09-10 16:39