[fpc-pascal] Status of Lazarus

[Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho]

Hello,

On 10/15/05, David Chandler <david at davidchandler.com> wrote:
> I am starting to get into Lazarus, as recommended by others on this
> list, but I wonder about its limitations, given that it is still in Beta
> release.

I wouldn't say it is in Beta. The latest lazarus (0.9.10) is very
stable. I recommend this version.

> Are there major
> unresolved issues or unsupported features in Lazarus that would likely
> throw up road blocks if I take the plunge with a real project?
.....
> I also need serial communications support to interface with telescopes.  The DOS version communicates over an RS232 port, but I would like to add/substitute USB support.

I am developing a digital osciloscope on an ISA card and with a
graphical interface created on Lazarus. It is already able to
communicate wonderfully with out ISA card both on Windows and on
Linux, with the same source code (using some IFDEFs of course) and
draw really fast graphics without any custom library (we are running
the app on a 233Mhz computer). The project will be finished on 1 to 2
months and is quite software intensive. We are implementing the
trigger, Fourier Analisys, a fast custom drawing component, precision
timers (we need less then 1 microsecond precision) and many other
things on this program, so I really would say it is ready.

After strip and upx my graphical interface for the osciloscope is
700kb heavy on linux and 400kb on windows. It works wonderfully on
both.

For me the worse problem is button glyphs being problematic on Windows
... but this should be fixed still this year. Aside from that only
small anoyances, but nothing that really blocks me.

>  How about file transfer across the internet from within the program?

There is a package for sockets. Also you can talk directy to the
correct APIs to implement this. My app talks directly to glibc to
implement access to the ISA Card while our device driver is not ready.
You can also talk directly to Windows API (on a IFDEF of course) or
any other library.

> these kinds of issues be barriers to cross platform development?

Yes .... so you need a package or unit that already implements it on a
multi-platform way or simply put:

{$IFDEF Win32}
     Call Windows API ....
{$ENDIF}
{$IFDEF Linux}
    Call glibc .....
{$ENDIF}

> (By the way, is there anyone out there who would like to collaborate on
> the project?

At this time I have a imense amount of tasks to do already, but I am
really interested on knowing how to access USB on lazarus code and,
even better, how to create the USB hardware interface. How is your
software licensed?

I am thinking about starting a "Hardware Access" section on the wiki.

--
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho