Well, Delphi is as good as dead. And, to be honest: good riddance. As the developments of the last ten years were nothing to write home about.
That does ask a question: without a Delphi lead, and Lazarus following and pushing specific Free Pascal changes, is there an overall goal where Free Pascal wants to go? Or is it over and done as well?
Like the ASML management said: at some point, all the competition was behind us, so we were the ones that had to come up with a good plan.
I can think of multiple expansions, although it is debatable if you would want to incorporate it in Free Pascal, or make a Lazarus library for it.
1. Lazarus GUI. Make a GUI that works equally well on all compiler target platforms and gives a unique look and feel to all applications. That would be the Apple way. Chance of success: low, without a strong and visible lead.
Why is this in this list, and on the first place? The main bottleneck is a unified compilation platform. No specific syntax, like with Objective Pascal or the JVM target. And coming from that, the incompatible event and widget models. And it would make the most difference in establishing Free Pascal / Lazarus as one of the main development platforms.
2. A slick, anti-aliased and zoomable OpenGL application GUI. Especially the text. That is easy to port, runs everywhere and looks much better than the current, pixelated ones. That would score major points with the customers of your applications. And it would be a requisite for the previous point.
3. Platform-agnostic, message-driven multitasking and multi-threading. Or, in other words: distributed processing.
Wow, tech alert! What is wrong with the current, event-driven one? Well, it doesn't scale beyond a single computer and CPU core. And the speed of that single thread/core barely increases over the hardware generations.
This happened more than ten years ago. Everyone expected, at that time, that by now every application would run across many computers and CPU's. But that didn't happen. Because everything is still single-thread based. There is very little development done in distributed processing. Mostly because there is this push going on for the last 15 years to web-based and mobile, which makes that futile. And so everything has stagnated over that period.
This is the best option to set Free Pascal / Lazarus solidly on the map from a technical perspective.
Well, I have more, but those are (IMO) the most important ones. And yes, I will help.