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Lazarus IDE 3.0

forum.lazarus.freepascal.org

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Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#51

Post by akkartik »

badsectoracula wrote: post #10
marcodiego wrote: post #8

Lazarus license make it so much better than Delphi that I can't find a reason to justify using codegear's solution nowadays other than legacy code. It is not that their alternative isn't good, on the contrary. The problem is that they simply can't win against the competition: they can't win over MS tools for windows, they can't win over Apple's tools on MacOS, they can't win against FLOSS tools for Linux. For everyth…

IMO there are two main reasons nowadays to check codegear's IDEs: you either have some huge Delphi codebase that you can't move anywhere else or you want C++ support with a full RAD IDE (i do not think there is anything as RAD-y as C++ Builder). QtCreator is a workable alternative though. Well, there is a third reason, you want to have some company to blame (and ask help from) when things break :-P

RAD, now there's a term I haven't heard in 10 years. Can you unpack how one modern compiled language can be more RAD than another? I thought it just meant having an IDE.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#52

Post by d3w4s9 »

atombender wrote: post #38
satvikpendem wrote: post #11

I keep hearing about Pascal and Delphi, especially on HN, what is it and why is it special or talked about so much? I understand it's an older programming language but not why it's so loved. Any recommendations on how to learn it and is Lazarus a good option for the IDE or does VSCode suffice?

It's nostalgia, for the most part, and I say this as someone who loved, and still love, everything about it. But I don't use it anymore and wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Everything started with Borland's Turbo Pascal back in the 1980s. It was an IDE with a lightning fast compiler and built in debugger. Extremely slick, and it was so fast that there was hardly any time to wait for a build. It was extremely small an…

Great insights, thanks. I used Delphi for a little bit and thought it was nice (much better and more "professional" than Visual Basic), and wonder what happened to it.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#53

Post by versteegen »

badsectoracula wrote: post #13

This wont be part of a Lazarus release any time soon (ok, it might be in 4.0 but i don't know when 4.0 will happen) as it is only on trunk, but recently i was fixing bugs for the Gtk1 backend. The neat bit is that Gtk1 is very small and while it isn't preinstalled anywhere nowadays (except Slackware) you can carry the .so as they are around 5-6MB or so. However it also supports static linking and after some quick hac…

Does FPC avoid using versioned symbols from glibc that would prevent it from running on distros without a recent glibc, unlike any C/C++ program compiled using system libc headers?

This is a particular problem with recent Slackware-current: I used to compile portable x86/64 linux binaries (from C+C++ sources or from FreeBASIC compiled to C) by patching out those versioned symbols using ld --wrap= flags, but since glibc 2.34 even that no longer works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32479545

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#54

Post by abeyer »

keyle wrote: post #43
badsectoracula wrote: post #13

This wont be part of a Lazarus release any time soon (ok, it might be in 4.0 but i don't know when 4.0 will happen) as it is only on trunk, but recently i was fixing bugs for the Gtk1 backend. The neat bit is that Gtk1 is very small and while it isn't preinstalled anywhere nowadays (except Slackware) you can carry the .so as they are around 5-6MB or so. However it also supports static linking and after some quick hac…

God I only took a peek at the screenshots and I want that environment so bad. I miss it. I realise what it makes me sound like, sitting on my M2 32GB 1TB monster. Nostalgia hits you in the feels.

I'd say it's a lot more than _just_ nostalgia, though that certainly can play in too... But there are plenty of aspects of this, like snappy interaction latencies and a small pool of simple but consistent UI components that behave the same every time you see them, that I think are objectively better than much of what we see today. There was absolutely something lost in consistency and quality when we resigned ourselves to most UIs starting with a blank HTML DOM and building their own custom UI from scratch.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#55

Post by dr_kiszonka »

atombender wrote: post #38
satvikpendem wrote: post #11

I keep hearing about Pascal and Delphi, especially on HN, what is it and why is it special or talked about so much? I understand it's an older programming language but not why it's so loved. Any recommendations on how to learn it and is Lazarus a good option for the IDE or does VSCode suffice?

It's nostalgia, for the most part, and I say this as someone who loved, and still love, everything about it. But I don't use it anymore and wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Everything started with Borland's Turbo Pascal back in the 1980s. It was an IDE with a lightning fast compiler and built in debugger. Extremely slick, and it was so fast that there was hardly any time to wait for a build. It was extremely small an…

The UI integration you described would be awesome for mobile dev.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#56

Post by signaru »

akkartik wrote: post #51
badsectoracula wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO there are two main reasons nowadays to check codegear's IDEs: you either have some huge Delphi codebase that you can't move anywhere else or you want C++ support with a full RAD IDE (i do not think there is anything as RAD-y as C++ Builder). QtCreator is a workable alternative though. Well, there is a third reason, you want to have some company to blame (and ask help from) when things break :-P

RAD, now there's a term I haven't heard in 10 years. Can you unpack how one modern compiled language can be more RAD than another? I thought it just meant having an IDE.

In the context here, it is about rapidly making a GUI by visually editing widgets, usually via drag and drop, pretty much like placing shapes in a power point slide. The IDE doesn't just contain a source code editor, but also that visual window/form "designer" (in Visual Studio jargon). The RAD IDE generates the GUI code from what you've drawn, instead of you having to manually type it yourself, hence the "Rapid" part. To attach code to an event (i.e. click) you often simply have to double click on the corresponding widget/control in the visual designer, or use the corresponding "Event" GUI element somewhere in the IDE. This was in contrast to how it was done with C++ options such as MFC prior to Visual Basic / Delphi.

It gets GUI layouts done fast, but I also think it has some drawbacks. Manually drawing controls, i.e. sizing & positioning, eventually becomes a tedious chore once you have a lot of them or if you anticipate frequent updates in the UI. One trick I always end up using is just using some simple math to do the layout as the form resizes. In C# + Winforms, I'd go further by bypassing the visual designer as much as I can and just manually spawn the widgets just like any other object. Other UI frameworks also assist in layouts or just don't make this a problem to begin with. For example WxWidgets, Qt and, if I'm right Ultimate++, have sizer/container controls that do the layout logic.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#57

Post by candl »

Years ago I was discouraged that there is a lack of a grid component like WPF's Grid or Delphi's TGridPanel. Something that I can specify the number of rows/cols and their sizing. Has this changed since? Or perhaps this is achievable nowadays with (nested?) TFlowPanels?

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#58

Post by alwillis »

satvikpendem wrote: post #11

I keep hearing about Pascal and Delphi, especially on HN, what is it and why is it special or talked about so much? I understand it's an older programming language but not why it's so loved. Any recommendations on how to learn it and is Lazarus a good option for the IDE or does VSCode suffice?

After learning BASIC in high school, as a CS student in the early 80's, my intro to computer science classes were taught in Pascal.

In college, we used DECWriter paper-based terminals and IBM 3270 terminals to write code. Our programs were batch processed on the school's IBM mainframe.

What's interesting to me is how well Pascal conceptually has held up with the current trend towards strongly typed languages.

When I look at Pascal source code today, it's remarkable to me how clean the syntax is. If our industry wasn't so driven by the hottest language/stack/framework that seemingly changes every 6-12 months, modern Pascal would still be a viable choice today.

Battlestar Galactica fans know the story line of how computers weren't allowed to be networked because that's what allowed the Cylons to gain access and nearly wipeout the human race.

In my fan fiction world, Free Pascal is the language the Colonies would use due to the Cylons exploiting the buffer overflows and the other issues of C/C++.

Kinda like: would we go the same route knowing what we know now about how using C for (nearly) everything turned out with vulnerabilities, etc.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#59

Post by nxobject »

keyle wrote: post #43
badsectoracula wrote: post #13

This wont be part of a Lazarus release any time soon (ok, it might be in 4.0 but i don't know when 4.0 will happen) as it is only on trunk, but recently i was fixing bugs for the Gtk1 backend. The neat bit is that Gtk1 is very small and while it isn't preinstalled anywhere nowadays (except Slackware) you can carry the .so as they are around 5-6MB or so. However it also supports static linking and after some quick hac…

God I only took a peek at the screenshots and I want that environment so bad. I miss it. I realise what it makes me sound like, sitting on my M2 32GB 1TB monster. Nostalgia hits you in the feels.

It's a 'brew install lazarus' away! It does a decent job at using Cocoa-like widgets as well, although it misses some of the animations you expect.

Re: Lazarus IDE 3.0

#60

Post by xyproto »

badsectoracula wrote: post #13

This wont be part of a Lazarus release any time soon (ok, it might be in 4.0 but i don't know when 4.0 will happen) as it is only on trunk, but recently i was fixing bugs for the Gtk1 backend. The neat bit is that Gtk1 is very small and while it isn't preinstalled anywhere nowadays (except Slackware) you can carry the .so as they are around 5-6MB or so. However it also supports static linking and after some quick hac…

I like the idea if including the UI library. I know that ie. Ardour are not looking forward to upgrading from Gtk2.

Could this technique be used with Gtk4+Wayland as well?

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