This was something like 500 Kb back in 2000, but it's still a far cry from your ~200 Mb Electron hello world.
Lazarus should have been the golden standard for creating desktop apps. Every other solution I've tried is subpar either in licensing or costs in general, executable size and resource usage, non native components, extra dependencies etc
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.
I think that projects that ship packaged web apps but attempt to use the system native web views where available are really nice, like Wails: https://wails.io/ (so for example, on Windows it would use Webview2, so you don't have to package an entire Chromium install yourself)
Here's a comparison of how the distribution sizes change, Wails in particular also has way faster builds than something like Tauri: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...
That said, I wish we got more native software, or even something like LCL that can target Win32, GTK, Qt or whatever else is available. Sure, writing components that are available on a lot of platforms and work similarly everywhere is a pain for the developers, but I applaud the effort regardless, since the above solutions like Wails don't actually do anything for the memory usage and CPU cycles, whereas native GUI software is better for most apps that don't try to be very interactive.
I could even see myself using Lazarus/Pascal more if it seemed to have a more active ecosystem, right now I couldn't tell you what are the equivalents of something like Spring Boot for webapps, or even consuming Web APIs in client software, handling OAuth2/OIDC/JWT, seems like mORMot 2 would fit the bill the closest?
With respect to Lazarus, I agree that the ecosystem around it is not exactly great. It would be interesting to see LCL ported to something more modern that is reasonably simple, cross-platform and has good tooling. E.g. Go, much as I dislike it as a language, would probably be a great fit for something like that. And Pascal being fairly conservative and easy enough to parse, I suspect you could even automate this translation for the most part.
I could use C++ and stick with Qt, but I'd much prefer Rust. Rust has no good Qt bindings. What are my options?
The app makes use of QV/HBoxLayout, QWidget, Qdialog, QPushButton, and other really standard features. It reads from the filesystem, reads and writes to SQLite, and outputs sound from mostly ogg files at various speeds (through VLC behind the scenes). I stick with Qt because I like how it integrates with KDE and other desktops flawlessly.
> 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:
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.
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.
May be I am doing something wrong, but I had installed Android Studio, then Android emulator, SDK, etc., and before I could get a hello-world app to compile, some 30 GB were gone from my disk space.
If it comes to it, I do not personally mind using multiple tools and code for different target platforms, as much as (a) both the tools themselves and the binaries generated are lean, and (b) the development tooling itself is on a single platform just so that I do not need to maintain multiple hardware. (I currently use Windows, would likely need to move over).
Thanks.
In particular, his tech e-mail announcement/newsletter was where I first learned of a small startup w/ the unlikely name of "Google".
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
<input type="button" onclick="alert('hello world')" />
With Gtk, no, because it implements all widgets by itself rather than wrapping Win32, so it'll necessarily be larger. Also, statically linking it can be a pain (and AFAIK isn't even supported in Gtk 4 anymore).
Qt backend should be able to do that, though (but then of course you need all those Qt DLLs).
>Lazarus is a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development. It has variety of components ready for use and a graphical form designer to easily create complex graphical user interfaces.
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.
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.
Why would they explain that to their audience? They know.
I'm torn about which is clearer, that magic variable style or assigning to the function name as one does in VBScript. I guess the magic variable makes refactoring dirty fewer lines
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"
type PInteger = ^Integer;
var X: Integer;
function Foo: PInteger;
begin
Foo := @X;
Foo^ := 123;
end;
That's also "old style" Pascal, and still supported by Free Pascal (even though the compiler gives you a warning for doing it!).
Isn't it basically equivalent to an anonymous tuple which is automatically deconstructed on assignment?
And so it drives me crazy to see the state of their documentation. The wiki needs to be archived and replaced with a coherent documentation platform. It’s such a turn off. The whole website is a SWAG site frankly.
‘ SWAG sites
SWAG is an archive of tips and example programs for Turbo Pascal/Borland Pascal and early Delphi. Much of it is still applicable to today's Object Pascal - and much is obsolete...’
How can a language compete when a new user sees this?
Is this the wiki you somehow want to have removed? https://wiki.freepascal.org/
It seems perfectly fine, information-dense even which is even better. Seems a lot better than the typical one-long-landing-page-docs many languages have today. What exactly is the problem with the wiki that cannot be fixed and must be re-made from scratch?
It has good stuff, but I'd wager the "bad stuff" outweighs it by a large margin.
The problem is optics. Pretend I'm a brand new user and I want to build GUI applications. I've heard of a language called Freepascal and of an IDE called Lazarus. I think they're connected but I don't know how. And what's Delphi?
Where do I start?
? Welcome to the Free Pascal and Lazarus Wiki [2] https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/
? Lazarus Documentation https://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Documentation
? Welcome to the Free Pascal and Lazarus Wiki [1] https://wiki.freepascal.org/
? https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
Most IDEs and languages have a Documentation link. Which link do I use to start with?
FreePascal has lazarus docs and Lazarus has FreePascal docs?
As a new user I can slog through 4 different links of schtuff, I guess. (Disappointment and frustration lie ahead; broken old buggy software that doesn't match the documentation. New User doesn't know that yet.) Maybe I'll just look for Youtube videos, but my enthusiasm is draining.
I'm used to this:
https://go.dev/doc/ Everything linked from go.dev/doc works today and it's coherent. Everything.
As other responses mention, the docs as a rule are out of date and confusing.
[1] btw redirects to [2] from search engines.
I talked about this in my article about the release:
> 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?
Also AI also seems to get above average results with pascal code generation IMHO.
This doesn't match my own experiences, I've tried a few times to ask about Pascal and the results have always been appallingly bad. From nonsensical syntax (sometimes mixing in C-style syntax), to made up unit and object names, I'm surprised if it can even manage a correct "hello, world".
By comparison, Python generation can be pretty decent (not that it can't run into the same issues, but it is less frequent). I always assume it's because Pascal's online presence is gravely reduced compared to other languages. It is still a fairly popular language, but I'd wager most Pascal written is not published online.
Language is not a problem. Pascal is just C/C++ in another favor. LCL/VCL is a wonderful library, everything just works like what I am expecting.
The ALGOL committee rejected it, choosing a competing and much more complex language headed by Adriaan van Wijngaarden. This became ALGOL-68 -- and killed ALGOL.
Wirth took what was known as ALGOL-W and turned it into Pascal.
FWIW I wrote about this:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/04/niklaus_wirth_obituar...
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/07/algol_68_comes_to_gcc...
Another offshoot of Algol-60 was CPL, intended to be more general-purpose and capable. But it was big and hard work to get it working.
So Martin Richards designed, a simpler intermediate version, BCPL. (He also built an OS in it, TRIPOS. This formed part of AmigaOS 1.x.)
BCPL was further stripped down to B, and then evolved into C.
I do it with C, using opaque pointers for C objects. Painless because everything is statically compiled in.
If you want a more dynamic solution (i.e. Python), you'll need to find a way to link every component in (or at least the ones your Python would use).
I use Lua from Delphi and vice versa regularly
Besides Qt, does it have a pure Win API back-end as well?
Lazarus and FPC is a great project. Building GUI apps like with Lazarus does not have an easy alternative, from which I'm aware.
I have tried it now on my Mac, and I have to jump through some hoops to get it going. Again a pity, its a great option.
I guess I'll wait for the next minor.
Also, is there no binary installer for macOS on the Lazarus site? Just asking. Don't know if there is one.