[fpc-pascal] Re: CrossFPC is finally released

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, leledumbo said:
> lazarus was in beta for that many years, but this project has just got its
> FIRST beta in many years

It looks to me that they more or less just decided to release what they had
got. 

More far out features that were talked about on the maillist (like designer,
and debugging) are not in the release, and probably never will be.

I didn't mind those features back then, just didn't consider them very
realistic.

What back then annoyed me more was the idea to based on Delphi and Kylix
sources (with obvious non-freeness and (very) Linux/x86 specific behaviour).

It scares me that sources are still not available, despite the
announcement. But at least they seem to support ARM, so they probably
cleansed the worst from the sources. But without sources that is hard to
tell. It might be an horrible ifdef mess in unit libc.

They also must have done something about the Delphi side of things seeing
the amount of versions they support.

The trouble is that Kylix is nowadays much less relevant than back then, to
the extend that we put deprecated messages in the libc unit in FPC 2.6.2

Also the difference between Delphi and Lazarus as an IDE is much less,
cutting out another main motivator for the project.