Lazarus - Delphi risen from the dead?

Back in the 1990s I worked at a college with a guy who was a huge fan of Pascal afer he studied at university.

When I got into Visual Basic for Windows, he got into Delphi.

I was jealous of his Delphi features because he could create "standalone" programs. While Visual Basic had the ability to package up software, it was interepretted with a runtime.

The people behind Delphi also came out with an equivelant for the C++ folks called C++ Builder or something, but we didn't have a license for that. Our C stuff was of the Borland variety.

Fast forward to 2024 and I am again looking at how I can compile code for my clients across all the main platforms and I came across Pascal and Delphi again. Sadly the IDE is Windows-only but the open source community has been working for years on an open and cross platform version called Lazarus.

Apparently the project is so-named because the original project failed and got ressurected.

Object Pascal and Delphi is still going strong, and the IDE for that is much more polished, but being able to edit and compile on everything from your Mac to a Raspberry Pi is awesome, and with no licensing fees!

It's not the prettiest or smoothest system, but for free who can complain?

Previous versions required some addons to make the environment a single window, and tabbed UI, but the current candidate release allows you to set all that as an option. This means you can drag your IDE to another monitor, rather than single detached windows at a time.

And the IDE is built with Lazarus - you actually recompile when adding plugins - so anyone can fix bugs that they find I assume.

The apps are native and there are lots of controls available, here is one example project that uses images, data grid, and an SQLite3 database:

I am not a fan of sourceforge, nor gui apps that launch from the CLI, but again I paid $0 so I shouldn't complain.

Find it at lazarus-ide.org