A guided intro to the Free Pascal language

not only libc. what is very cool is that most of the parts of very rich fpc library has no libc dependency.

so necessary parts get linked statically to the resulting binaries, and those binaries do not require libc. most of the library goes with roots to kernel calls, bypassing libc.

once you start using threads or link to other c libraries (like gtk) then libc becomes a dependency.

There is also this https://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal

I also had mandatory pascal during my high school years. Although I knew a little of C, C++ and python at that time and felt a bit obscured about learning pascal, today, I deeply admire my teacher's choice of pascal. Pascal has a nice beginner terminal IDE with a debugger and breakpoints; it has types, stack allocation and memory planning before the program is being run; recursion is possible, and it does not have many obscure features like pointers and OOP obscurities. Today, perhaps I would suggest Julia as the first language to teach, but pascal is still at the top.

It is a beautiful language.

You can have your C/C++ code exposed to Free Pascal via a C API loadable as a shared library / DLL, but beyond that there isn't much you can do (Free Pascal comes with a `h2pas` tool to help convert C headers to Free Pascal units for such use).

This is of course far from having something like C++ Builder.

To have something like C++ Builder it'd need a lot of things to work together:

1. A C++ compiler will need to be extended so it can use Free Pascal classes (in terms of memory layout) and add any necessary language functionality for "published" sections (RTTI data that allows FPC objects to describe themselves and be streamed/serialized), metaclasses (classes in FPC are objects and can have their own virtual methods, including virtual constructors), delegates (basically "fat" pointers) as well as data types like sets, strings, etc that FPC has. LCL (Lazarus' framework) relies heavily on pretty much all of FPC features.

2. FPC will need to somehow be able to import classes defined on the C++ side too so that components written in C++ will be usable in Lazarus. Also almost goes without saying but it should be possible to statically link programs using both FPC and C++ in the same executable.

3. The C and C++ runtime libraries will need to use FPC runtime library functionality for things like memory management (FPC's memory manager is pluggable) so that "crossing" memory management will work fine - even across dynamic library boundaries (e.g. calling `malloc` on the C++ side and then "FreeMem" on the Free Pascal side, even when the latter is in a dynamic library that shares a memory manager with the host program, should Just Work).

4. Lazarus' "codetools" will need to be expanded to support parsing C++ in addition to Free Pascal so that all of the IDE's automatic code writing and refactoring functionality will work for C++ too - things as simple as double clicking on a button and having the methods be written automatically in the editor with the cursor placed in the method body rely on this working.

These are from the top of my head, there might be other issues to handle, but even from the above it should be clear that it requires not only a lot of work but also a lot of different projects to work together (unless FPC and/or Lazarus devs decide to implement their own C++ compiler and runtime).

In the short term it might be easier to use Qt Creator which has some RAD-ish features. It is certainly clunkier, the API feels to be made with a code-first (as opposed to LCL's WYSIWYG-designer-first) approach and the IDE isn't as featureful (also at least for me it never works out of the box on Linux) but it is the closest open source project you can find for C++.