[fpc-devel] Excellent work you guys have done

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi,

I know I sometimes bitch about some little thing in FPC or Lazarus.
Well, it's not all bad. :-)  I often tell other people about our
company experience with FPC and Lazarus. This time I thought I would
forward one such email here.  Just to show you guys that we (as users)
do appreciate all the efforts you guys put into these projects. Keep
up the great work - CodeGear should tremble in their boots!


-------- Original Message --------
Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2008
From: Graeme Geldenhuys <graemeg@******.co.za>


******* wrote:
> We are still unsure if we ever gonna make the move to fpc/laz, we need
> to invest to much time in converting our existing apps,

Well, we invested in Borland since D4-D7, plus Kylix 3 Pro (and then
Enterprise). We invested heavily in CLX and Borland showed us the
finger. It costed us a lot of time and money! We decided long and hard
(4 months of research) if Delphi or even Object Pascal was the way to
go, or if we should jump ship to C/C++, C#, Java etc... We evaluated a
lot of tools and languages. Luckily we stumbled across Free Pascal and
then Lazarus. A familiar language and no more worrying if the company is
only thinking about it's shareholders and not developers using there tools.

Free Pascal and Lazarus developers work on their tools because
programming is their passion. That's why we are in this line of business
as well. These project are here to stay!

Like I've mentioned to a few other people as well. We moved over 4 years
ago, and don't have a single regret. We always have the latest compiler
for free, the latest IDE for free, get much quicker fixes applied and
the support is something CodeGear can only drool about (and for free).

The Free Pascal compiler is absolutely great! In many respects I think
it's way better than Delphi's compiler. The Lazarus community and
Lazarus IDE is also pretty awesome. The IDE is easy to extend and add or
amend features that are lacking. Plus, it's light on resources - so it
flies on any PC. Oh, and the Lazarus Packages (*.lpk files) are heaven!!
They are not nearly as feature-less as Delphi packages. Lazarus Packages
are not just used for creating dll's, they are a vital part in how we
develop our apps. Segmenting areas or code, has their own settings and
handles unit paths for you. Yes the IDE is different to Delphi's IDE,
but it was never designed to be a Delphi IDE clone. Only the LCL was
designed to be a VCL clone. It's take about a week to get to know the
IDE - then Delphi IDE starts feeling strange. ;-)

4 years ago, the LCL was too inconsistent between platforms. If you are
only targeting a single platform, you would never have noticed any
issues. We were quite picky as well and detected minor things normal
users clearly never noticed - but those little things were important to out
product. After a while with LCL we decided to go our
own route and roll our own GUI toolkit. That was all a long time ago,
and I'm sure the LCL has improved all this - their development is quite
fast paced. I know the IDE has improved tremendously over the last few
years.

I would highly recommend any development team to set aside one developer
and at least let him or her play with Lazarus and FPC for a week. Get
onto the FPC and Lazarus mailing lists as ask questions! Create
prototype apps that reflect your real business - no "Hello World" sh*t.
Playing with Lazarus and FPC for a hour does not do it justice -
*nobody* can review such a tool chain in an hour!

Okay, that's my advertising done for the month!  :-)  I should actually
write a case study or white paper on this. ;-)

Graeme.
-------------------------------[  end  ]-----------------------------


Regards,
  - Graeme -


_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/