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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Member since:2005-07-06
I wouldn't be very quick to judge an IDE just by it's look. The OpenDylan IDE has a distinct Win95 look to it, but in many respects it's more advanced than Eclipse or NetBeans (eg: full compiler integration). SLIME is a pre Win95-looking Emacs add-on, but it's much more advanced than NetBeans or Eclipse in ways that matter.
I used Eclipse for a couple of projects over the period of a year, and I'm not very impressed. It's basically got a lot of gimmicks to make up for two major weaknesses: no real integration with the compiler, and a language that requires lot's of wizards and crap to get anything done.
That said, I'm not saying the FreePascal IDE is any better, but rather that you'd be surprised how a primitive-looking interface can hide a lot of powerful features, which show themselves only when you use the thing to write a lot of code.
Member since:2005-07-07
The "IDE" that the article refers too is about as close to an "IDE" as notepad. What a bunch of misleading garbage. I read the article thinking dang man they must have something like Netbeans or Eclipse and what do you get instead, a friggin DOS based piece of crap that looks like the same friggin 386 compiler I used back in 1993 for ADA.
Hi, the included IDE is actually not as bad as you make it sound. It is a clone of Borland Turbo Pascal's IDE for DOS.
However, the IDE that was talked about in the article that can do RAD is called "Lazarus" and you can find it at http://lazarus.freepascal.org/
Lazarus really is a good IDE if you've used something like Delphi or the early versions of VB. It's very comparable to those. It also can do cross platform applications just like stated in the article, it really is just a simple recompile away from another platform. I'm just not a huge fan of Pascal, but if I was I'd definitely be all about Free Pascal/Lazarus, the speed of the compiler is just absolutely amazing after having used hello-world-in-c++-takes-five-seconds-to-compile-on-a-dual-core
GCC. Not that it is a fair comparison since C++ is a very difficult language to compile.
Member since:2005-11-14
Thanks for the link, I will check it out.. I figured there had to be something better than what I saw from the Free Pascal site. And as far as trying to compare the DOS version of Free Pascal to Netbeans or any other full featured GUI based IDE ( this is in response to the first guy who posted a response to my thread ) don't even think about going there. I would love to see someone sit down and whip out a GUI in FPC DOS at the same time someone is whipping out the same GUI in Netbeans and lets just see who gets done first. Anyway thanks for the link.
Member since:2006-01-16
Where did you learn to read pal?
The "RAD" IDE is called Lazarus from http://lazarus.freepascal.org
The textmode IDE ala TP is called fpIDE and is part of the free pascal package (and btw. most fpc devels still use that because it had better gdb support in windows).
In any case next time, before you put something down, please try to read properly.
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2005-11-14
The "IDE" that the article refers too is about as close to an "IDE" as notepad. What a bunch of misleading garbage. I read the article thinking dang man they must have something like Netbeans or Eclipse and what do you get instead, a friggin DOS based piece of crap that looks like the same friggin 386 compiler I used back in 1993 for ADA. Pascal was my first language and as such I kind of have fond memories of it since it is so easy to learn. So I was really excited when I read this article thinking I may have found a good cross platform solution for developing some GUI utilities that I need. Come to find out after downloading and installing the "IDE" it was nothing more than a DOS looking (yes I am not kidding) DOS looking piece of software right out of the pre-Win95 days. And I totally agree with the post above by evangs, comparing this to Eclipse is a complete mis-representation of the facts. Eclipse, Netbeans, Visual Studio, and SharpDevelop are light years ahead of this dinosaur and there is no friggin way you can compare them with "Free Pascal". So unless I am just not finding the right "IDE" on the Free Pascal website then this is a total joke and should not be considered a serious contender for any major development decision. If there is a real "IDE" for Free Pascal please post a reply with the location because I would love to see it.