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Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

forum.lazarus-ide.org

11–20 of 129 posts

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#11
Free Pascal has come a long way. When I first messed with it, it lacked generics even though Delphi supported them. Nowadays I can compile Delphi code with generics just fine.

I don't think I personally would want to use Delphi in this day and age, but there's still a lot of useful Delphi/Pascal code out there and it's great to be able to use it on Linux.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#12
post #9
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss WYSIWYG IDE's like Delphi, VB-classic, and Lazarus. Dealing with HTML "autoflow" and Bootstrap is a royal pain. You sketch a draft GUI that seems a good fit for the application and users, and then realize you have to jump through hoops backward on a unicycle while chewing gum blindfolded to get it right on web browsers. Jetsons WYSIWYG technology yanked from my happy fingers by an LSD "standard". (I'm assuming…

Can I interest you in a very Delphi-like IDE for building web apps with nothing but Python? https://anvil.works has a WYSIWYG visual designer, with Python for in-browser code as well as server-side. (We compile it to JS.) It's even got a built-in DB if you want it (Postgres-backed). Everything in one language, full front-to-back autocompletion...all the things we missed about Delphi!

Nice product but it may have been better to release this as a opensource product because there will always be a fear that if your company goes bottoms-up, those companies who used your platform will be left high and dry.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#13
post #9
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss WYSIWYG IDE's like Delphi, VB-classic, and Lazarus. Dealing with HTML "autoflow" and Bootstrap is a royal pain. You sketch a draft GUI that seems a good fit for the application and users, and then realize you have to jump through hoops backward on a unicycle while chewing gum blindfolded to get it right on web browsers. Jetsons WYSIWYG technology yanked from my happy fingers by an LSD "standard". (I'm assuming…

Can I interest you in a very Delphi-like IDE for building web apps with nothing but Python? https://anvil.works has a WYSIWYG visual designer, with Python for in-browser code as well as server-side. (We compile it to JS.) It's even got a built-in DB if you want it (Postgres-backed). Everything in one language, full front-to-back autocompletion...all the things we missed about Delphi!

If you released this as a node.js type app which can be run directly on the user's desktop and accessible via the browser for some setup functions and via an editor like VSCode etc for the source code editing, this could be a great product.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#14
post #4
post #2

Wikipedia provided this simple description, which would be nice to see on the RC post (but perhaps they assumed the only folks interested in an RC post would be folks familiar with the tool already): Lazarus is a free cross-platform visual integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development (RAD) using the Free Pascal compiler.

I miss WYSIWYG IDE's like Delphi, VB-classic, and Lazarus. Dealing with HTML "autoflow" and Bootstrap is a royal pain. You sketch a draft GUI that seems a good fit for the application and users, and then realize you have to jump through hoops backward on a unicycle while chewing gum blindfolded to get it right on web browsers. Jetsons WYSIWYG technology yanked from my happy fingers by an LSD "standard". (I'm assuming…

Yeah, me too. They were one of the steps on the pathway of enabling users and blurring the line between user and programmer. Sadly, the industry lost interest in personal computing in favor of turning users into a resource to farm and feed to advertisers.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#15
post #4
post #2

Wikipedia provided this simple description, which would be nice to see on the RC post (but perhaps they assumed the only folks interested in an RC post would be folks familiar with the tool already): Lazarus is a free cross-platform visual integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development (RAD) using the Free Pascal compiler.

I miss WYSIWYG IDE's like Delphi, VB-classic, and Lazarus. Dealing with HTML "autoflow" and Bootstrap is a royal pain. You sketch a draft GUI that seems a good fit for the application and users, and then realize you have to jump through hoops backward on a unicycle while chewing gum blindfolded to get it right on web browsers. Jetsons WYSIWYG technology yanked from my happy fingers by an LSD "standard". (I'm assuming…

I cut my teeth on VB classic, as I'm sure a lot of folks my age did. I was learning C/C++ concurrently, got through the basics, and of course hurried to GUI programming since that's what I made. It's been 20 something years, but I remember it being something like 31 lines of code to just get an empty window in Windows. With VB it was basically zero effort. I wish WYSIWYG IDEs for both desktop programming AND html (remember frontpage, or hotdog?) would make a comeback in a big way. To this day I shy away from GUI programming because of how tedious it is.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#16
I love the idea of a WYSIWYG IDE that's integrated with the language like this, or like VB used to be, but personally I just can't stomach the whole "have to learn yet another language to use it" problem. From what little I've played with Lazarus and FPC it seems really nice though, and I might make use of it for some smaller projects at work in the near future. I'm sick of trying to make web apps and all the ridiculous nonsense with that process.

One wonders why we don't have a more generic form of this sort of thing. And no, I don't mean the various "GUI builders" that are out there that produce code you then have to merge with your program, or an XML descriptor that you have to parse with your program, because those are still specific to having bindings for your chosen language.

There really isn't a reason I can think of that I shouldn't be able to throw together a GUI in a WYSIWYG editor and maybe define some basic behavior, then give it one or more programs it should run in the background and pass messages back and forth. Or even let me just tie events to a command pipeline and dump the result into another widget, basically just letting a GUI be part of the composable toolset following the UNIX philosophy.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#18

I love the idea of a WYSIWYG IDE that's integrated with the language like this, or like VB used to be, but personally I just can't stomach the whole "have to learn yet another language to use it" problem. From what little I've played with Lazarus and FPC it seems really nice though, and I might make use of it for some smaller projects at work in the near future. I'm sick of trying to make web apps and all the ridicul…

Object Pascal is a nice language and it's terse (it's surface is quite small).

In a lot of ways it feels like a forerunner of C# (unsurprising as the lead on Turbo Pascal/Object Pascal was Anders Hejlsberg).

I loved Delphi 6, still miss it in some ways.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#19

I love the idea of a WYSIWYG IDE that's integrated with the language like this, or like VB used to be, but personally I just can't stomach the whole "have to learn yet another language to use it" problem. From what little I've played with Lazarus and FPC it seems really nice though, and I might make use of it for some smaller projects at work in the near future. I'm sick of trying to make web apps and all the ridicul…

> There really isn't a reason I can think of that I shouldn't be able to throw together a GUI in a WYSIWYG editor and maybe define some basic behavior, then give it one or more programs it should run in the background and pass messages back and forth. Or even let me just tie events to a command pipeline and dump the result into another widget, basically just letting a GUI be part of the composable toolset following the UNIX philosophy.

Sure, you can do that, but you need a protocol/interface/API between the GUI and the program(s) it interacts with, and then you need to either manually consume that in the language those programs are in or have a library that handles the interaction, and the problem ends up being essentially equivalent to language bindings directly to the API.

Re: Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

#20

I love the idea of a WYSIWYG IDE that's integrated with the language like this, or like VB used to be, but personally I just can't stomach the whole "have to learn yet another language to use it" problem. From what little I've played with Lazarus and FPC it seems really nice though, and I might make use of it for some smaller projects at work in the near future. I'm sick of trying to make web apps and all the ridicul…

> There really isn't a reason I can think of that I shouldn't be able to throw together a GUI in a WYSIWYG editor and maybe define some basic behavior, then give it one or more programs it should run in the background and pass messages back and forth. Or even let me just tie events to a command pipeline and dump the result into another widget, basically just letting a GUI be part of the composable toolset following t…

Not really, as you only need to implement handling for the messages you actually care about and you can pass them through, say, a file descriptor. Just like UNIX commandline tools do. You could handle that in a bash script.
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