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

OCTAGRAM 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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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zerr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I wish Lazarus had support for C++ as well. Pascal/Ada's English prose syntax is a deal breaker.

	▲	pjmlp 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Apparently Markdown is much better.
	▲	zulux 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Pascal Syntax is horrible for programming. It's verbose and confining. It's wonderful for reading ten years later and figuring things out.

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pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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FooBarWidget 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	adornKey an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It improved a lot and it is good. On Linux I think the default way to go is still Lazarus. But with Delphi you can buy more shiny polished things on top. So for commercial use Delphi is more relevant. And there are enough differences in compatibility, so you most likely don't want to deal with both at the same time.
	▲	DanielHB 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I used briefly some 8 years ago, it is very good for getting full-native (including native UI toolkit) cross-platform desktop apps. It can build self contained binaries that just work. My use-case was building a simple USB-stick-portable application for windows and it was great for that.
	▲	kmaitreys 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		If you can bear his idiosyncrasies, Tsoding did a stream on it recently. It was pretty cool. https://youtu.be/4vcA7yJMoPg
	▲	mkovach 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Over the past year, I've replaced quite a few of my Tcl/Tk GUI apps with versions built in Lazarus. Lazarus 3.x was a bit quirky for my tastes, but 4.x has been very good. It's not quite the Delphi experience, but it's close enough that I could see myself using Lazarus for day-to-day development and being fairly productive with it.

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FpUser 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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