> On Dec 25, 2022, at 1:28 PM, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
>
> According to https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ Lazarus is a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development. It has variety of components ready for use and a graphical form designer to easily create complex graphical user interfaces.
>


There are two popular Delphi clones: Lazarus and FreePascal. I haven’t worked with either of them, but from what I can tell, Lazarus is a little closer to what Delphi is. FP implements a lot of innovative language features that a lot of us wish would be adopted in Delphi.

Also, I think Lazarus includes a basic IDE, but FP is just a complier. VS Code is becoming a universal IDE for many rogue languages like these.


One of the greatest features of Delphi is its backward compatibility. ou can take a program written for the earliest versions of Delphi and get it working with relatively little effort on the latest versions of Delphi.

One of the greatest problems Delphi has is … it’s backward compatibility.

Microsoft never paid much attention to the need for each successive version of C#, Visual Studio, or even the .NET framework to be 100% backward compatible the way Delphi is (with a few notable exceptions during Delphi's evolution).

So C#, Java, and even FreePascal have lots of cool language features added to them over the years that the Delphi world is still eagerly waiting to see.

Eg: case statements that use strings as the discrminant. Delphi only lets you use ordinal numbers. Most other contemporary languages let you use strings as well. Another is a simpler way of expressing closures and anonymous methods as parametrs and inline expressions.

Interestingly, the TMS WebCore framework uses a slightly enhanced version of the language to help simplify the use of the asynchronous nature of web interfaces. It’s also missing some of the latest language features that have no real impact on the language (eg, inline variable declarations).

TMS components and libraries do support Lazarus, and some support FreePascal.