Well I am old enough to remember good ol’ days of DOS programming, back in the 80ies I’ve started with Turbo-BASIC and Turbo-Pascal, somehow Turbo-BASIC and its successor Power-BASIC won and tough I was using Pascal and Delpi till 2000 I made the switch to VisualBASIC and later on to RealBASIC the predessor of Xojo.
I think the time has come to take a peek at Lazarus.
Quite the same RAD, cross-platform, a huge community and the most striking rationale: It’s Open Source LGPL!
btw when speaking about Power-BASIC… it seems Xojo is heading same direction…
For many year’s there is a constant stream of ppl ranting and scanting. But they were in a minority and this is quite normal for projects, forums and websites in the internet. No one can deny that this constant stream has increased dramatically with departure of 1st class and well-known devs and former staff members And still either any indication of changes or any reaction at all on this.
That frightens me cause this indicates a certain downward spiral. And of course I am looking beyond the edge of the plate, cause I am running a fucking business and I am dependent on the technology and the tools I am creating and working with.
Python is one key, and right now I am exploring Freepascal as my second key technology for the future. I have still an active Xojo License till fall 2021. I would consider myself stupid by wasting this time.
I need safety and reliability and the certainty that something will still exist when thinking in long timeframes of 7-10 years. Cause no business client ever would pay for a complete rewrite of his tool or software. He would rather walk away and find something else.
I am using it on Debian, Installation was quite straightforward with apt. The IDE is pretty well known if you know former Borland Delphi. Of course it looks kinda alien in GNOME3, something like Win95 missing GTK manifest files but it’s ok to me, XOJO doesn’t look better either. And of course it has property grouping I assume this is something Mac specific only.
I’ve just started looking into Lazarus this week, (after getting a shock from the price of Delphi - ridiculous)
Couple of teething issues getting it installed and running (after Xojo, Im not used to having mess about with libraries, FPC, hooking into Xcode and the like)
But having reached a point where I can compile, I have to say, it’s starting to feel pretty comfortable. Stumbling blocks are working out what libraries to include for things, such as having to add .UI if I want to use a TColor type. And the internet is full of out of date information, so focussing on ‘what works today’ needs a bit of care.
It’s been 32 years since I last used Delphi 1 & 2, and yeah.. forgot everything I ever knew…
But I’m chipping away at it, and because I’m ‘starting from scratch’, it’s making me ‘do things better’
Many many years of using Xojo led to mixing UI and data code in forms.
I’m now compartmentalising properly, and might be able to properly use code to cross compile.
Too soon to compare speed, but back in the day, I was using Delphi DLLs to speed up VB6 apps.It will be interesting to see what happens.
I am using it on Debian, Installation was quite straightforward with apt. The IDE is pretty well known if you know former Borland Delphi. Of course it looks kinda alien in GNOME3, something like Win95 missing GTK manifest files but it’s ok to me, XOJO doesn’t look better either. And of course it has property grouping I assume this is something Mac specific only.
