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Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE

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

#121

Post by narag »

pjmlp wrote: post #113
narag wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got no idea why Microsoft was going apesh· for bytecode all of a sudden. Delphi probably was one of the main reasons. It was a lot better for Windows 32 development than VB and there were projects to port it to Linux. Microsoft then recruited Delphi leads, settled a long running suit with Borland (with the fallout of stopping Delphi for Linux development) and finally created a platform where they keep control, u…

Java was the reason. COM Runtime was going to be native (Ext-VOS), but then they decided to go VM path and .NET was born. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net... If you read Don Syme blog entries about .NET history, you will see a few similarities with WinRT. Just with .NET metadata instead of the old COM type libraries. So the double bet on COM since Vista was a bit like WinDev's revenge. How…

I can't find anything in the post you link that supports your conclusion. The author seems to be a person from the research area, in the team for F# maybe?

Who do you think had more weight in the decision, this guy or the chief architect for .NET that came from Borland? Of course Java was the model for the VM thing, but that's the what, not the why, the reason they, in the words of the gp, went apesh··· with the bytecode thing.

Actually I can neither be in the mind of whoever made the call, just make an educated guess, but at least it has a base on facts that I was paying attention to at that time.

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

#122

Post by lmz »

tabtab wrote: post #54
lmz wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it can do that. That's how the IDE works and displays the GUI designer.

Can you recommend any documentation on the "meta" angle? Most documentation I find assumes the creation of "static" widgets that are activated or hidden at run-time (or at least act that way).

This is for Delphi however it should be very similar for Lazarus: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1005373/creating-compone...

Nothing magic. Create it, set properties.

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

#123

Post by Hasknewbie »

TomMarius wrote: post #81
frbaroni wrote: post #74

Just advertising, you can use Lazarus to build WebApps nicely using Brook Framework: https://github.com/silvioprog/brookframework

No screenshots :-/

...And no doc. On the FreePascal wiki, the Brook page points to a 404 on GitHub.

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

#124

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

blunte wrote: post #106
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #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 ridicul…

Learning another language, if you've already learned a few, it's a very small cost if the other benefits are big. After all, many of use learned some of the languages we learned because of the benefits that came with them. I learned Java because of the promise (long ago) of write one run anywhere. I learned Ruby because of the promise of Rails. I learned Go because of the promise of fast and single-file-executable (m…

I don't disagree that learning new languages is relatively easy, I know a bunch myself already, it's just that to use a language very effectively you have to be able to think in its terms and that requires some time investment. Fluency takes time.

You've seen code written in language X before and been able to instantly tell it was ported from language Y, right? It's the programmer equivalent of a literal translation from Chinese, where the words are English but none of the metaphors, euphemisms, or subtle connotations are accounted for.

And it isn't even like I have something against Pascal, it seems better designed than C and is just as mature, but I don't really want to invest the time needed to gain fluency at this point in my life. And when I think about that, I wonder why I should need to for this kind of functionality.

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

#125

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

rcarmo wrote: post #60
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #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 ridicul…

Pascal was my first academic programming language, so “the yet another language” thing is… debatable :)

I thought this was obvious but apparently my phrasing was confusing: I meant that on a personal level. I personally would have to learn Pascal as I only know a tiny smidgen of it right now.

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

#126

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

pjmlp wrote: post #118
mhd wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think one of the reasons why new languages are going for compilation again is the death of the multi-architecture ecosystem. Support x64 and ARM and you can play with the big boys. Back then? Intel was barely considered mature, every Unix manufacturer (including sun) had their own processor architecture, and who knew what was coming out for the smaller devices ("thin clients" were all the rage). I still think that…

We were able to do multi-architecture with compiled languages just fine. What Java had going for it, was being free (beer), more stable across OSes than a mix of K&R/ISO C, pre-ISO C++, batteries included libraries with GUI support and endless amount of money thrown out by Sun, IBM and Oracle driving adoption (yes they were into Java almost since JDK 1.0). As for .NET and bytecode, see my neighbouring comment.

> We were able to do multi-architecture with compiled languages just fine.

Indeed, we can even distribute them all in the same package on some systems (like NeXT). Here's an idea: have an OS that guarantees support for a certain bytecode VM and format for binaries that supports multi-arch. Now developers can compile to native and the bytecode, so even any unsupported arch will still be able to run the application with just some additional overhead. Now your OS can be distributed for new and experimental archs and still be usable because people's favorite applications will still work.

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

#127

Post by pjmlp »

narag wrote: post #121
pjmlp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java was the reason. COM Runtime was going to be native (Ext-VOS), but then they decided to go VM path and .NET was born. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net... If you read Don Syme blog entries about .NET history, you will see a few similarities with WinRT. Just with .NET metadata instead of the old COM type libraries. So the double bet on COM since Vista was a bit like WinDev's revenge. How…

I can't find anything in the post you link that supports your conclusion. The author seems to be a person from the research area, in the team for F# maybe? Who do you think had more weight in the decision, this guy or the chief architect for .NET that came from Borland? Of course Java was the model for the VM thing, but that's the what, not the why, the reason they, in the words of the gp, went apesh··· with the byte…

Read the Ext-VOS paper linked there, then go read the WinRT implementation MSDN documentation about IInspectable, WinRT type libraries.

Don Syme is one of the researchers responsible for .NET and the implementation of .NET generics. F# was a follow up project on his career.

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

#128

Post by tabtab »

lmz wrote: post #122
tabtab wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you recommend any documentation on the "meta" angle? Most documentation I find assumes the creation of "static" widgets that are activated or hidden at run-time (or at least act that way).

This is for Delphi however it should be very similar for Lazarus: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1005373/creating-compone... Nothing magic. Create it, set properties.

Thanks!

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

#129

Post by amyjess »

tomc1985 wrote: post #101
tabtab wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the "industry" adopts them as a standard, then they could take off (and if not encumbered by intellectual property lawsuit risk). XUL also looked "too Webby" to me, closer aligned to HTML than desktop-like GUI's.

I'd beg to differ, XUL produced very clean native UI yet accepted styling with CSS years before I'd seen anything else like it. At the time I was writing Firefox addons and I was blown away but what I could do with it vs. WinForms or somesuch RIP XUL, you died too early

FYI, XUL is being kept alive by the Pale Moon/Basilisk team, who has created a next-generation platform based on XUL called UXP (Unified XUL Platform).

https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/UXP

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