[fpc-pascal] What to do to get new users

[Nikolay Nikolov]

On 10/16/24 5:29 PM, Hairy Pixels via fpc-pascal wrote:
> On Oct 16, 2024 at 9:18:01 PM, Nikolay Nikolov via fpc-pascal 
> <fpc-pascal at lists.freepascal.org> wrote:
>> I also have some experience from my day job on making a VS Code 
>> extension for the Nim language (you can see my commits in the Nim 
>> language server here 
>> https://github.com/nim-lang/langserver/graphs/contributors and for 
>> the Nim VS code extension here 
>> https://github.com/nim-lang/vscode-nim) and I can definitely say VS 
>> Code is horrible crap. It's buggy as hell, new versions break API 
>> compatibility all the time and it makes it look like it's your 
>> language extension's fault.
>>
>
> Not my experience. I prefer the editor in Sublime Text but VSCode is a 
> good debugger which works with LLDB and Pascal. VSCode is wildly 
> popular as well so FPC is missing out on new users by not having this 
> as option. Maybe some packages you used were the culprit? They have a 
> monthly update cycle too so I would think they catch these things.

I don't know, it could be the Nim to JS compiler, or the fact that the 
previous plugin developer didn't use the LSP protocol, but direct 
integration instead. But I don't like the whole idea of an IDE, written 
in JavaScript. It's horribly bloated and difficult to debug.

The LSP protocol is fine, though. I like the idea, it allows integration 
with many different IDEs and editors. Sublime Text is just one example, 
there are many people who use Vim, Neovim, Emacs, Helix and many others. 
I also think it's a nice and quick way to improve the console IDE by 
adding an LSP client. But I have a huge backlog of things to do, so I 
haven't started on this, yet.

> When I learn a new compiler these days I download the installer, run 
> it, then check VSCode or Sublime Text for extensions to install in one 
> click. If that doesn't work I probably just give up because I idon’t 
> have time to be playing around and there’s myriad of new languages to 
> play around with these days.

Yeah, it's tempting with its store of extensions. Too bad most of it is 
crap. And it's not fully open source. Sorry, I use it at work, and just 
don't like it. Anyhow, there's nothing wrong in developing an VS Code 
plugin for Pascal. Anybody interested can try to do that. Most of the 
work is probably fixing the LSP server, as it does most of the work. 
This way, the extension itself can be kept minimal.

Best regards,

Nikolay
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