[fpc-pascal] Lazarus and FPC integration

Agustin Barto abarto at gmail.com
Sun Oct 30 17:00:45 CET 2005


On 10/30/05, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho
<felipemonteiro.carvalho at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Please give objective reasons to back up your statement that Lazarus
> is a bad IDE (and test the latest stable one to see if the problems
> were not fixed).
>

a) Unicode didn't work for me on any (including the lastest) version
of Lazarus. I don't know if this is a bug related to my particular
enviroment (x86/FC4) or a limitation of the code editor.

b) When I really needed the multiplatform feature of Lazarus, I
couldn't get the UI to look the same on Windows and Linux. I had some
serious layout problems. The speed wasn't the same either.

c) My capstone project did some pretty intensive numerical computing.
On Delphi it behaved reasonably good. The binaries compiled with fpc
where OpenOffice.org 2.0 slow! even with aggressive non-portable
optimizations (obviously this isn't lazarus problem).

d) Most of my work comes from refactoring old code. Lazarus
refactoring features are pretty basic. This isn't much of a problem,
though. Most of the Pascal (and ObjectPascal) code I work with is
beyond refactoring (the language imposed architectural limitations).

e) The problem with beign Delphi-like (or visual design-centric) is
that it imposes some pretty ugly designs on the programmer, and this
creates bad habits. For small projects this is obviously not a
problem, but when you have to reuse code that comes with huge programs
designed with these methods in mind, it can be a pain in the ass. (not
entirely Lazarus' fault, though).

I've worked with a lot of development enviroments and I can see any
reason (other than the license) to use Lazarus over others. If I
*have* to use ObjectPascal on Linux there are no competitors for
Lazarus, but when I get to choose the language I choose Java/Eclipse,
Java/NetBeans or any Smalltalk-based IDE if the project requires OO,
and KDevelop/C for the rest.

Please note that *I use Lazarus and I will use Lazarus in the future*
(or at least until I get rid of the old ObjectPascal legacy code), but
until some of the issues are solved (like the Unicode problem) I'll
try with Emacs/fpc first.

btw, I really wouldn't like to start a flamewar :)



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