alt Hacker NewsHow good is Lazarus nowadays? Haven't taken a look for 20 years so this is a genuine question.
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Someone maintains a GitHub readme comparing Delphi and FPC with Lazarus. It’s deeper than a couple of feature checklists.
https://github.com/ideasawakened/delphi-and-fpc-lazarus-comp...
It improved a lot and it is good. On Linux I think the default way to go is still Lazarus. But with Delphi you can buy more shiny polished things on top. So for commercial use Delphi is more relevant. And there are enough differences in compatibility, so you most likely don't want to deal with both at the same time.
If you can bear his idiosyncrasies, Tsoding did a stream on it recently. It was pretty cool.
Over the past year, I've replaced quite a few of my Tcl/Tk GUI apps with versions built in Lazarus. Lazarus 3.x was a bit quirky for my tastes, but 4.x has been very good.
It's not quite the Delphi experience, but it's close enough that I could see myself using Lazarus for day-to-day development and being fairly productive with it.
I used briefly some 8 years ago, it is very good for getting full-native (including native UI toolkit) cross-platform desktop apps. It can build self contained binaries that just work.
My use-case was building a simple USB-stick-portable application for windows and it was great for that.