I just wanted to give everyone an example of why we would rather get a Win32 API interface completed for the LCL. We have developed for GTK so why shouldn't that be good for Win32 as well? Well it just isn't, because GTK for Windows just isn't nearly as stable or useful as it is for Linux.

To show that I built a version of Lazarus using the latest GTK libraries for Win32. I modified the FPC GTK units to use these new libraries and built a version of Lazarus against these libraries.

Now you will see that a great deal of Lazarus DOES work in Win32 using GTK. However a great deal also does not work. For example synedit works great in Linux but has all sorts of problems in Win32. Different items involving color are not implemented in the Win32-gtk, etc. etc. etc.

Now maybe once a good version of GTK2 is available for Win32 and we have modified the LCL interface to use GTK2 we might not have some of these issues. But until then ......

Anyway if you would like to see Lazarus running in Win32 using GTK you can download the following zip file.

ftp://ftp.us.freepascal.org/pub/lazarus/gtk_lazarus.zip

It is 2,854,107 bytes in size.

It includes a built version of Lazarus and the gtk libraries that it needs to use. Just unzip this into an empty directly and run it.

There is no guarantee how this might crash your machine. :-)