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Lazarus is easier than the first two by far and you get self-contained native executables (no runtime requirements or extra DLLs, at least on Windows), native w
by Crinus 7y ago
Lazarus is easier than the first two by far and you get self-contained native executables (no runtime requirements or extra DLLs, at least on Windows), native widgets (on Linux you can choose between Gtk and Qt, though the latter does need a "bridge" .so), very low memory consumption (think a handful of MBs for a very simple application and memory requirements do not grow much outside of your own use - to give a ballpark, i just opened Lazarus itself with a simple program and the task manager reports just 36MB of RAM use for the entire IDE) and very good performance.
From the development side you get WYSIWYG UI editing, an IDE that has deep understanding of the code and updates it "live" as you make modifications to the UI (and other "managed" components), very fast compilation times, a very mature and rich framework (which is also very stable as the developers almost never break backwards compatibility meaning your code will compile for years to come) and recently the IDE got an online package manager and installer (repositories existed for years but they were manual to install).
Also the entire IDE can run and be usable even on a first generation Raspberry Pi (though for comfort, especially with the UI designer, it is a better to use something slightly faster).
The negative side is that as it relies on native widgets, it is much harder to create custom themes. Though there are themeable controls available (especially if you are not against paying for them as there are a few companies selling commercial components for Lazarus). Personally i prefer native controls anyway.
- rhabarba 7y ago> you get self-contained native executables Have you ever heard of static linking? Assuming you're using a GUI framework that has a sane license which allows that, it is rather easy to get "self-contained" native executables in most languages. Lazarus is nice though: Delphi has always been an awesome RAD IDE and Lazarus brings cross-platform support to it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Crinus 7y agoLazarus does use static linking for its own libraries and the license allows that. Yes you can do the same with other languages, but this was just a single feature among others, i'm not presenting every single one of them in isolation in a way where if you can find other languages/environments invalidate everything else, i'm presenting these features as a whole. If anything the self-contained part is a minor feature (and not universally available, it really depends on the backend, though for most OSes you can use one that has no external requirements). Lazarus being much easier to use than the first two while requiring minimal resources and providing an advanced yet lightweight IDE (among other stuff) are more important IMO.
- rhabarba 7y agoLazarus could move on to a single window though. I find the free-floating windows rather annoying as they are hidden behind other windows more often than not.
- lpcvoid 7y agoYou can use docking packages to make it exactly like Delphi.
- rhabarba 7y agoI have read the Free Pascal wiki about that right after wondering why they don't do that by default. I would like to add "... by default" in my original suggestion. (Thank you for the hint though.)
- lpcvoid 7y agoYeah, I feel that they should actually make it default. By the way, check out Codetyphon [1], if you don't know it already. That is one hell of a component and library collection, and it has a lot of added features for the IDE. Really bad Website, though. [1] https://www.pilotlogic.com/sitejoom/index.php/downloads/category/14-codetyphon https://www.pilotlogic.com/sitejoom/index.php/downloads/cate...
- rafaelvasco 7y agoYeah Lazarus is really a RAD environment. Unfortunately I don't like Pascal nor Modern Pascal that much. My holy grail is something of the same quality but using C# which, for me, is the superior language by far.
- cztomsik 7y agoPascal has one great benefit, compiler is fast as hell - so fast that it could (incrementally) compile & launch your application in 2-3 seconds on Intel Celeron 333mhz. Or at least this was true for Delphi, not sure about Lazarus
- Crinus 7y agoWhat do miss from C# compared to Free Pascal? Outside of something like LINQ and lambdas i can't think of any other major difference between the two languages (and lambdas are WIP, i think they already work in the trunk), what do you have in mind?