Lazarus Release 4.0

I think unfortunately what holds Lazarus back is the Pascal programming language. Although it is a very capable language that can hold its own against other languages, it suffers from a reputation of being obsolete.

It’s a pity that the C family of languages won out over Wirth’s languages. Pascal’s superior string handling alone would have saved us from countless security flaws.

Why doesn't the linker strip out unused code?

> What are my options?

> I stick with Qt

These come up on search results if you combine Qt plus the language.

Go:

* https://github.com/mappu/miqt

Java:

* https://github.com/OmixVisualization/qtjambi

Nim:

* https://github.com/jerous86/nimqt

* https://github.com/seaqt/nim-seaqt

Zig:

* https://github.com/rcalixte/libqt6zig

https://areweguiyet.com/

Also did you test similar functionality in C++, I haven’t compared many implementations but I app I use that has an SQlite db being read with Qt(C++) is pretty sluggish whenever you touch the DB.

Maybe store the values in a dict and only read/write from sqlite when needed. Dicts are very fast in python.

> I could use C++ and stick with Qt, but I'd much prefer Rust. Rust has no good Qt bindings. What are my options?

There are several Qt binding for rust, for example cxx-qt. I haven't tried myself but it looks maintained. Why is it not good?

Otherwise, the most promising equivalent to Qt in Rust would be Slint.

Is Cython and/or avoiding copies an option?

Java perhaps? That was one of the core promises of the Java ecosystem.

It was the common complaint about writing VCL apps in Delphi - that single message box app would be 0.5MB binary.

But that was the static overhead of VCL core library and the benefits were considerable compared to writing raw WinAPI.

And unlike MSVC 16kB WinAPI executable you didn't have chance of sudden surprise "oh, but you need to update msvcrt.dll to run this" because Delphi (and Lazarus/FPC) default to statically linking the runtime

That's indeed a statically linked binary. Release, with smart linking (so only things that are actually used are linked; otherwise it'd be ~20 Mb), debug symbols stripped. Measuring .exe size when linking dynamically would kinda defeat the purpose of the experiment, since you'd still need to distribute the DLLs to the users for any real world app.

I think Go will do it, but I indeed enjoy Free Pascal for this as well. It's also nearly trivial to set up cross compilation using FPCUpDeluxe, so I've shipped applications to clients on Windows when I do all development and compiling on GNU/Linux.

.NET can create self-contained executables pretty easily (via _dotnet publish_), both including the required framework assemblies and without them. But they'll still be comparatively large.

The wiki is full of incomplete, obsolete, or otherwise not-so-useful articles. It suffers from typical "wiki as documentation" efforts, where instead of concentrated efforts from domain experts, you get a thousand half-baked opinions.

It has good stuff, but I'd wager the "bad stuff" outweighs it by a large margin.

The only relevant part I can find from that article is:

> One criticism we've seen of the FreePascal project in general concerns its documentation, although there is quite a lot of it: eight FPC manuals, and lengthy Lazarus docs in multiple languages. There is a paid-for tutorial e-book available, too.

The criticism is that there is too much documentation available? And they're long, and dare even to be available in multiple languages?

Ok, using WinAPI means it is not easily theme-able, unless they provide custom set of controls. I assume it is possible to use Qt back-end for Windows as well. I wish Lazarus also supported C++ akin to C++Builder. Pascal is a deal-breaker many.

This is one of the best introductions to what programming a computer is about that I know. I highly recommend checking it out, even if Pascal-like languages are not your cup of tea.

`Result` is clearer given that in Pascal, a function name by itself in any other context is a function invocation (with no arguments). That is, you then have this kind of stuff:

  type PInteger = ^Integer;
  var X: Integer;

  function Foo: PInteger;
  begin
    Foo := @X;
    Foo^ := 123;
  end; 

> I'm torn about which is clearer, that magic variable style or assigning to the function name as one does in VBScript.

That's also "old style" Pascal, and still supported by Free Pascal (even though the compiler gives you a warning for doing it!).

I'll often use `result` as the return value in other languages, largely because I learned it in Delphi 25 years ago. It doesn't have the automatic return value semantics elsewhere, so you also need `return result` or whatever, but it's crystal clear what the intent is. I prefer it for that reason alone.

>I also have mixed feelings about golang's `func Doit() (result int, err error)` syntax. To quote another platform, "there should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it"

Isn't it basically equivalent to an anonymous tuple which is automatically deconstructed on assignment?

For glance reading code, a predictable variable name or return keyword is a lot easier imo.

Because these things get shared elsewhere and end up getting looked at by someone who has no idea what the product is, like me, this time, with Lazarus.

Since I read about the guy who was surprised that anything other than SPAs exist (the full page reload magic incident), I realized there are way younger people in the field with no context or knowledge of CS history whatsoever, so some of them not knowing about Lazarus or Delphi sounds totally plausible.

You forget that every day, someone wakes up who is new to this planet.

I have also met people who have to ask what Lisp is. You might be surprised at how many people don't know things like this.

I know Delphi, yet I didn't know Lazarus until now. I'm sure there are others like me.

I can understand not wanting to explain Delphi, but come on, not everyone knows the name of every IDE for every language. It doesn't hurt to add one sentence explaining that. If I hadn't seen the comment above, I wouldn't be able to consider Lazarus in the future if I ever use Delphi again.

10000 thousand people a day hear about any given topic for the first time in their life https://xkcd.com/1053/

> Delphi and Lazarus have been around for decades. It's like asking what lisp is.

No.

Everyone thinks their pet project is obvious and self-explanatory.

This is NEVER EVER a safe assumption. Remember that our entire industry is a mysterious black box to the outside world.

I worked for A Prominent North American Linux Vendor for a while. I was hired to work on the docs for one of their projects.

I'm an industry veteran with at that time over 25 years of broad cross-platform tech experience from CP/M to Linux to mainframes.

It took me a month of hard digging to get an extremely vague overall concept of what the product was and did.

Most of the company had no idea -- it's not Linux-related in any way -- and many of them regard the entire product platform as an evil to be expunged.

This is typical for that vendor. Aside from their Linux distro, ask for a tweet-length summary of any of their portfolio, expressed in general terms not specific to that product or vague marketing-ware, and nobody in the company can give it.

Nonetheless they are a multi-billion-dollar vendor.

But they only sell into established markets.

Yeah, technically you could add text with the link submission, but it will demote the link somewhat and I guess is just frowned upon here.

Oh it seems my point was ambiguous, I really meant the website should include it