What is the crowd's opinion of Lazarus?

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Delphi might be good, but with those prices they are killing it. No individual (or ok, very few individuals) will buy it and without them, you don't have mind share. One reason that Turbo Pascal was so popular back in 80s and early 90s is that it combined quality with a very cheap/affordable price.

Today if i want a Delphi-like program, i prefer to use Lazarus. It also supports Linux properly and doesn't feel like a crawling system hog.

Lazarus (Free Pascal) fits the bill.

1. Easy to use - your first programs are just drawing windows and pressing the Play button. Then you draw a button on a form, double click it and type ShowMessage('Hello world');. Next thing, you draw an input box and change the code for the button to ShowMessage('Hello ' + Edit1.Text);. The IDE provides code smart completion and guides to help. Offline help is available for everything, including a language guide.

2. Game development - it is an optimizing native compiler with no 3rd party requirements and provides access to OpenGL out of the box. But even without OpenGL, it has more than enough graphics functionality by itself. You can even do simple 2D games using the drag-and-drop functionality of the IDE.

3. Cross platform without any modifications - Free Pascal has to be right behind GCC as the compiler available to most platforms and Lazarus supports all major desktop platforms, some minor (i think it can run in Haiku with the Qt backend) and runs on low-end hardware like Raspberry Pi.

Of course here i'm talking about the whole package, not just the language. But in practice FPC is mostly used via Lazarus anyway and Lazarus' installer contains everything.

Lazarus should be close to what you are looking for. You can create native executables for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X using a RAD IDE where you design the forms (windows, dialogs, etc) of your application visually and attach events and code to it (the code is in Free Pascal which is a modern object oriented Pascal dialect with features somewhere between C++ and C# but with Pascal keywords). Lazarus has a rich framework called LCL (Lazarus Component Library) which is built on top of Free Pascal's FCL (Free Component Library). Both are mostly API compatible with Delphi, so many things that you can find online about Delphi also apply to Lazarus (although it also comes with mostly full reference documentation).

Here is my 3D world editor with Lazarus running in the background (the editor is made with Lazarus). This should give you an idea how the IDE looks.

Thats what I love Lazarus for. Damn fast compilation and static executables. But for me, Lazarus is a better IDE than VS Code, and RAII instead of GC wins in my book. Oh, and it has Generics^petpeeve.

But in all seriousness, I think Go will surpass Lazarus in usage, which makes me sad. On the technical side Lazarus is so far ahead of Go it's not funny. It's been around longer, the libraries are stable and high quality, it's just that the community is a lot smaller, docs suck, and people gag when they hear it's a Pascal dialect, instead of looking into it and building an opinion based on fact...

> what gain in memory efficiency is worth writing in pascal

Depends on what you are looking for. If you want raw speed, C is probably much better with the current compilers. FreePascal offers an easy to read syntax and advanced object oriented programming support. Also thanks to Lazarus it has one of the most advanced IDEs and frameworks for creating crossplatform GUI applications that require no 3rd party dependencies and use native widgets/controls.

So, if you want to work with stuff that works, stick to stuff that you know it works? Neat.

Although the problem with Delphi specifically (as the thumbnail spoils), is that the current company behind it seems to be in the business of taking advantage of the people trapped in the existing codebases written in it more than making Delphi itself better and more widespread (which include, among others, giving a free version without expecting immediate returns and giving a low cost version for small ISVs which comprise a large part of their userbase). If you want to go to that direction, go towards Lazarus instead.

Also i found these two comments amusing:

> In the May 2014 Tiobe index C# has dropped to 6th and VB6 is now the most popular Microsoft programming and tutorial language

...

> Microsoft must be proud. After all the time and money they have spent, VB6 – the language they have ignored for the last 16 years – is their leading programming language !

It's interesting how quickly one can get past the "funny syntax" problem. begin/end instead of curly braces, or ahmygerdallthosebrackets in Lisp. After a few days you stop seeing them. I'd suggest you give Lazarus a shot: Just like Delphi 7, but with a few more modern goodies, and works on and compiles to Windows, Mac OS and Linux. My secret weapon at work.

C++ is (only IMHO, of course) a terribly ugly language. Why not go for something more elegant, like FreePascal, and/or its GUI'ed companion, Lazarus? Or [Ada](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language\))?

Stand out from the (C++) crowd!

Since i'm making a lot of tools in Lazarus/FreePascal, i decided that making a FreePascal version of my LIL language would be a good idea. It took me a while to actually write that one (as can be seen from the commit dates), although it was mostly because i had other more important things to do.

I think that having two implementations of the language would help it, even if it is in a "i'm too bored to implement the same thing twice, so lets make sure it is really worth the effort" way :-P

The FreePascal version doesn't contain the language documentation. That can be found in the C version's repository.