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?
Glad to see that RISC-V is supported as a target:
https://wiki.freepascal.org/Platform_list#Supported_targets_...
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 everything else where Delphi may look like a good option... Well, for that there is Lazarus.
I love it because I have good memories on Delphi back in the nineties.
Amazing! I love Lazarus and FPC. I don't use it every day but it is excellent to make small standalone tools in.
I recently used freepascal’s turbo pascal + dos style ide as a retro way to do the advent of code 2023.
It was a blast from the past for sure. Is this / Lazarus just a retro thing or do they have practical utility in 2023 also ?
Meta: This old forum design makes me nostalgic.
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?
“FreeBSD/Linux”. No wonder people think FreeBSD is a Linux distro.
Pascal was the first language I tried in my youth, it has forever imprinted my understanding of programming. I'm both immensely thankful and perplexed by it.
I love Lazarus and FPC. Happy to see this release, I've been using the fixes branch so it's good to see the new stuff rolled out.
i wish for lazarus IDE, but with golang XD
Cool, but you can't pay me enough to touch Pascal again.
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 hacking i made Lazarus to statically link against Gtk1 but dynamically link against X11, etc, thus making binaries that can run in pretty much every distro (assuming of course what Gtk1 provides is enough). The neat bit is that the static binary is only around 1.5MB larger than the equivalent binary linked dynamically with Gtk2.
Here is a little mesh viewer test for some docview-like API i wrote recently (not part of Lazarus itself, this is part of a package i use with common code across my Lazarus apps) that was statically compiled with Gtk1 on Slackware running on a Debian which has no Gtk1 libraries at all[0]. Also a bonus screenshot[1] with another mesh viewer (this is a different project[2]) compiled twice, once with the Gtk1 backend and once with the Qt6 backend with the exact same code (just changed the target "widgetset" from the project settings).
[0] https://i.imgur.com/Y4jvQMk.png
[1] https://i.imgur.com/NE2LB3U.png
[2] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/jtf/