I finally got around to browse the Linux Journal Magazine (September 2009) that this month features cross platform development, and noticed the word Lazarus at the top of the cover page. Yes, it is an article about the Delphi like IDE. The article is written by Mattias Gaertner, a member of the Lazarus project.
The article is an overview of Lazarus/FPC and cross platform development. It explores Lazarus/FPC cross platform capabilities and dices into some of the IDE features. The cool aspect of this article is that is being presented in a non Delphi venue that is dedicating it’s pages to cross platform development. This exposing a Pascal IDE to a “new” audience.
Most certainly, Lazarus brings to the table cross platform development in a way that is more native to your target than .NET et al. Lazarus produces native code for Windows, Macs and Linux. I can only imagine where we could have been if Borland would have gotten Kilyx right… In any case, I have played with Lazarus and FPC for the past couple of years and I am to a point that I am willing to start a small cross platform project solely using Lazarus and FPC.
Here is a link to the article – unfortunately one has to be a subscriber to read. If you are not a subscriber, you can go to your local newsstand or book store and read the article.
Unfortunately every time I have so far tried to use Lazarus for (small) projects, it just failed miserably to deliver. Once the source code becomes a bit more complex than “hello world”, the IDE tends to crash all over the place. I tried the Windows and the Linux version, the latter seemed to be a bit more stable, but in my opinion this is nothing I would base a business on. (And I’d love to be able to develop cross platform for Windows and Linux with the comfort of a Delphi like IDE.)
On the other hand, the Lazarus IDE has got some nice features that even Delphi doesn’t have. But if it crashes every so often and I lose my work, no features can get me to use it.
@Thomas,
If you are having a hard time with Lazarus like me try MSDE (RAD IDE). I am playing with it at present and I seem to like it.
It was not possible to “get Kylix right”. A native cross-platform IDE requires anyway a knowledge of the platform few Delphi developers had (including those working on Kylix itself) and takes time to build, while most Linux developers are a very “close” community, giving a dirty look to anything not using GCC or not being GPLed. If you add Pascal language to it you’re died even before. That’s why Linux has that wide gap between C/C++ applications and scripts. At least, everything running on a VM/interpreter does not require to dig deeper, and many developers prefer it.