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What Lazarus and Free Pascal need is someone to sponsor a full-time technical writer to produce reference and tutorial documentation. There so much potential i

What Lazarus and Free Pascal need is someone to sponsor a full-time technical writer to produce reference and tutorial documentation. There so much potential in both Lazarus and Free Pascal but I suspect many curious minds give up because of the scattered and often out-of-date docs. The official Free Pascal documentation is terse and formal, but not ideal for learning purposes. So many people complain about Electron or rush to use it. Yet, Lazarus gives you cross-platform apps with self-contained binaries. How many people will never give it a second glance because there's no getting starting guide to ease them into the language and tools? (I realise some people, possibly many, will never give it a chance because of Pascal). Interesting aside and previously discussed on Hacker News: Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages: How does energy, time, and memory relate? - Pascal ranks well in this analysis. https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages https://sites.google.com/view/energy-efficiency-languages https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15249289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15249289

realharo 8y ago
>So many people complain about Electron or rush to use it. Yet, Lazarus gives you cross-platform apps with self-contained binaries. - The UI has the same old "grey boxes" style that plenty of classic desktop libraries used. - For online apps, you don't get to reuse any parts of your web app (which probably has a fairly similar UI anyway). - Imagine trying to create something like Spotify, or Slack (complete with inline HTML previews and videos and whatnot), or even VS Code with this. - From a brief look, it seems all UI code has to use imperative mutations (`setText`, `addItem`, `hideButton`, etc.). There is nothing like React as far as I know. I'm not even aware of any "old school" data binding library. Correct me if I'm wrong. This is not a practical alternative to Electron in any significant way. Maybe for some niche uses (small tools, etc.)
sysrpl 8y ago
I agree, the documentation is difficult to find and work with. That's why I maintain a few useful resources that are shared with the community. Here are the reference documents in searchable form. It can be easily integrated into the IDE with F1 context sensitive help opening the appropriate pages: http://docs.getlazarus.org/ http://docs.getlazarus.org/ Also to help you understand the Free Pascal dialect you can interact with my railroad diagrams: https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/language/lexical/ https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/language/lexical/ Also you can just use or add to the Lazarus learning portal or for that matter any page on my site (it's a custom wiki type website): https://www.getlazarus.org/learn https://www.getlazarus.org/learn

realharo 8y ago

>So many people complain about Electron or rush to use it. Yet, Lazarus gives you cross-platform apps with self-contained binaries. - The UI has the same old "grey boxes" style that plenty of classic desktop libraries used. - For online apps, you don't get to reuse any parts of your web app (which probably has a fairly similar UI anyway). - Imagine trying to create something like Spotify, or Slack (complete with inline HTML previews and videos and whatnot), or even VS Code with this. - From a brief look, it seems all UI code has to use imperative mutations (`setText`, `addItem`, `hideButton`, etc.). There is nothing like React as far as I know. I'm not even aware of any "old school" data binding library. Correct me if I'm wrong. This is not a practical alternative to Electron in any significant way. Maybe for some niche uses (small tools, etc.)

sysrpl 8y ago

I agree, the documentation is difficult to find and work with. That's why I maintain a few useful resources that are shared with the community. Here are the reference documents in searchable form. It can be easily integrated into the IDE with F1 context sensitive help opening the appropriate pages: http://docs.getlazarus.org/ http://docs.getlazarus.org/ Also to help you understand the Free Pascal dialect you can interact with my railroad diagrams: https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/language/lexical/ https://www.getlazarus.org/learn/language/lexical/ Also you can just use or add to the Lazarus learning portal or for that matter any page on my site (it's a custom wiki type website): https://www.getlazarus.org/learn https://www.getlazarus.org/learn