Hi,

Someone had made an interesting project. You may see the screencast here:

https://forums.codegear.com/thread.jspa?threadID=14612&tstart=0

Nice work! It's good for both sides, Delphi and Lazarus. But, I'm personally not interested since it would double my work, one with it, another with Lazarus. Lazarus alone is more than enough to me, . What I don't understand is the responses to this project in Delphi forum, as you may read here:

https://forums.codegear.com/thread.jspa?threadID=14612&tstart=0

Everyone seemed to be surprise and happy. As you already knew, Delphi people are quite offensive to FPC/Lazarus with many arguments which are mostly wrong and non-sense. But, if there's a project that *indirectly* uses FPC/Lazarus through Delphi, as this one and CrossFPC, they could accept it. Can someone explain this phenomena? :D

Having posted on that thread already, I'm not sure I understand your comment. I just checked to see if there were new posts there bashing Lazarus or FPC and I don't see it. One poster thinks Lazarus is a "disaster", but it's only one post. I don't really see anything wrong with the desire for the CrossFPC tool if it ever came to fruition. Dean only asked if it was possible to compile in FPC in Delphi. I prefer developing in Delphi over Lazarus on Windows myself and would love that feature. ModelMaker Code Explorer and other add-in tools I have for Delphi are really nice and I miss them if I do something in Lazarus.

As for the project, it's not very compelling for a Lazarus user to me but we'll see. The process, from the video, appears to start in Delphi where the coding is done, and then exported to a Lazarus format primarily just for recompilation on the target platform. Unless they did a lot more than I expect, it would be a far more limiting environment to work in than Lazarus. I stand by my comment that it's nice, worthy of support, and would probably be a good choice for a simple project that needed to be cross platform. But for anything complex you need a tool that you can create your own components in. I'll look at it, and if it's cheap perhaps even buy it to reward the effort. I can see using it for some simple utility apps and the like. But if you want reporting, charting, ability to descend and customize your own components, you need Lazarus. This won't change that unless they've actually recreated CLX or something (possible, but doubtful and the video doesn't show enough to tell).

-Ron

That is a strange phenomena, I agree! So indirectly using FPC/Lazarus and they are very happy. Using Lazarus directly under Windows, Linux, Mac etc and they are not happy???? The latter is a lot less effort.

Plus, what happens if they want to create custom components? Do they have to create them in C++ (because that is what wxWidgets is written in) and then create Object Pascal bindings for those components. Double work!! Simply use Lazarus with LCL or fpGUI and be done with it!

Delphi users are just weird - thank goodness I moved over to the dark side before I became like that. ;-)

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Well, being a "wierd" Delphi guy, I hope I provided at least some rationale for the desire to see some kind of "CrossFPC" utility in my previous response. I miss my addins in Lazarus. Call me lazy, I don't care. I'll use any tool that means I write one less line of code or helps me write it faster. I'm more productive in Delphi, simple as that. But I do all my regular computing in OS X, and working on learning how to develop in it as well, so Lazarus is of very keen interest to me. Downloaded QT 4.5 last night and will follow the Lazarus OS X QT version much more closely now. I'd offer to help, but I'm potentially the worst C++ developer in the history of mankind...

I agree with the second part per my email on the same topic. Unless they've done way more than I expect a complex app will feel handcuffed quickly.

-Ron

Ron Grove wrote

Well, being a "wierd" Delphi guy, I hope I provided at least some rationale for the desire to see some kind of "CrossFPC" utility in my previous response.

:-) I've used Delphi for much longer than FPC/Lazarus, but the force is quite strong in the dark side. ;-)

?I miss my addins in Lazarus. ?Call me lazy, I don't care. ?I'll use any tool that means I write one less line of code or helps me write it faster.

I'm just like that! Hence the reason I ported and modified my Lazarus to suite my needs. I have a lot of customized keyboard shortcuts and a ton of code templates that get triggered with just a few keys. It took a while to get to this point, but I can honestly say I am now more productive in Lazarus than in Delphi. But the last Delphi I used was v7, so I can't comment on any Delphi IDE after v7.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Ron Grove wrote

Having posted on that thread already, I'm not sure I understand your comment. ?I just checked to see if there were new posts there bashing Lazarus or FPC and I don't see it. ?One poster thinks Lazarus is a "disaster", but it's only one post.

I think Bee meant the overall feeling the Delphi users have against FPC and Lazarus - not just in that post. Like I said before, I don't understand why? CodeGear could benefit from embracing FPC and vice-versa.

but we'll see. ?The process, from the video, appears to start in Delphi where the coding is done, and then exported to a Lazarus format primarily just for recompilation on the target platform.

And what happens if things don't work so well under Mac? Can they modify the code under Lazarus and if so, how do you get those changes back into the Delphi code? I can only see that process work for very simply projects like the one in the demo.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

I don't see anything in the video that prevented you from making edits in Lazarus. He copies files back and forth for some reason, not sure what's up with that. I don't have to do that because VMWare Fusion allows for pretty seamless file sharing.

As for CodeGear benefitting from embracing FPC, I haven't bought the argument. FPC and Lazarus would make a Windows only Delphi completely superfluous if they had the same third party component support that Delphi does. It would suffer the same fate as most Java IDE vendors as the open source ones got feature parity. Not interested in starting a debate on it, but I only see them becoming irrelevant by embracing FPC. If they want to survive, they need to make themselves a more compelling product than FPC and Lazarus are. They were on the right path with Kylix and completely dropped the ball. Then they dropped it with a costly, misguided .NET strategy. They're fighting for existence my friend and FPC/Lazarus only highlight their past failures and future challenges IMHO.

-Ron

project to a Lazarus project - which ended up in a separate directory. I'm not sure if Delphi and Lazarus can share the same wxWidget based project (the point I was trying to make). Without actually trying it myself, I have no real clue what is possible and what isn't.

As for CodeGear benefitting from embracing FPC, I haven't bought the argument. ?FPC and Lazarus would make a Windows only Delphi completely

As far as I see it, CodeGear is competing in the Developement Environment market. To me, that is the IDE and VCL framework - not so much the compiler. So by them embracing the Free Pascal compiler, they already get a x-platform compiler (more than just Windows+Linux kylix compiler). Now they simply need to tune the compiler for new language features (D2009 language features etc) and build there VCL to be truely x-platform like LCL does.

It's a three step process (to simplify things a lot.
1) Use the FPC compiler and make the existing Delphi IDE work with it. So CodeGear still gives Delphi developers all the IDE benefits and plugins like ModelMaker support, UML designing etc which Lazarus IDE doesn't have.
2) Now they can start making VCL x-platform - similar to what LCL does.
3) Release a new x-platform IDE based on the new x-platform VCL.

But yeah, this is all a pipe dream. CodeGear is fighting to stay alive in a very competitive market - especially seeing that they limiting themselves to targeting only the Windows market and trying to compete with Microsoft and their tools.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Hello:

By the way, Watching the demo I can see that Lazarus compiles (or complies and links) very slow compared to codegear. And it is just "hello world" program.
I have always felt the Lazarus was a little slow, but this demo has shown it clearly. In codegear, the click run pops a progress message for an instant and displays the application running, in Lazarus he has to wait several seconds to see the form running.

Do you have any clue of such a difference of performance?

Santiago A.

Bee escribi?:

This is a FAQ since day 1, I think :-)

Delphi works with the compiler in-memory, as a DLL. Lazarus has an external compiler, and often the compiler even calls an external linker.

This is a price you pay for a cross-platform solution.

Michael.

Michael Van Canneyt escribi?:

It is a very good clue :-).
Besides this, I suppose gdb executable is nice beast as well.

It is an acceptable price. I wish designing webs and writing javascript for "cross-browser" solution were as cheap. You, lazarus' developers, have proved that Linux and win32 are more compatible than Firefox and IE.

Santiago A.
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