Empezado por rene in PAZCAL

This has been an interesting week with releases. First of all, the freepascal project announced the release of the FreePascal Compiler version 2.0 This is a moment we've been long waiting for. The freepascal group hesitated releasing a new version for, well, years. Although the 1.9 versions were very usable, there were some issues regarding standardization and a few bugs. with the release of 2.0 new standards in the open-source pascal environment are set! Lazarus, the IDE for FPC, is not at version 1.0 yet, but promised they will be soon.

Borland also released something new: Delphi 2005 Personal Edition. Their previous personal editions were only shortly available for download at borland's site, although registering the product and fetching the -free- key was possible. However, you needed to find the download by other means, or get it from some pc magazine. Wonder how long D2005PE will be available at Borlands.

The releases of those two products makes it harder for programmers to choose. Is freepascal finally grown up, will the lazarus IDE be as good that it can compete with delphi?

Borland is aiming at the .NET market with delphi 2005. .NET seems to be accepted by a number of application developing companies. On the other hand, lot of programmers have seen delphi 8 and delphi 2005, and decided not to walk this .net path.

Why is that? .NET puts a lot of limitations on your code. Pointer handling and direct memory/buffer access are made impossible, thereby unnessesary slowing down a lot of applciations. Although the standartd vcl promises to be .net compatible, a lot of programmers don't want te be put up with the restrictions. Further is .net not standard on any platform. Although there exists the mono project, to develop a .net compatible platform for unix, this is no guarantuee for compatability.

So, after all, if you want to write cross-platform applications, it looks like freepascal may be the best bet after all.

In either case, it has been proven that (object) pascal is far from being a dead language. Too bad the gcc project refuses to integrate fpc. Integrating fpc with the gcc environment would be a big step in acceptance, and integrating pascal as language in cases c or c++ is not desired. The freepascal project has offered efforts for to integration, the gcc project just told them, well, to f..k off.