Recent

Author Topic: with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?  (Read 56301 times)

AkiFoblesia

  • New member
  • *
  • Posts: 9
with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« on: June 09, 2007, 04:30:13 pm »
i do not intend to start a flame war.

but on the outset, this is how i see it:

lazarus advantages over free turbo delphi:
-  more components
-  open source
-  more active community, or so it seems
-  components can be added (in delphi, this is available only with the paid version)

lazarus disadvantages against free turbo delphi:
-  far more buggy
-  less expert advise
-  less programs available that show credibility

so, w/c is a better choice?

for general purposes, i would say free turbo delphi for now, though lazarus must not be totally counted out.

for database using firebird, however, lazarus has a very strong point against free turbo delphi in that it can accomodate additional components. in this case, i would say try both :D

theo

  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1927
RE: with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #1 on: June 09, 2007, 05:01:54 pm »
You forgot the most important advantage of Lazarus:
Cross platform

Vincent Snijders

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *
  • Posts: 2661
    • My Lazarus wiki user page
RE: with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #2 on: June 09, 2007, 05:06:57 pm »
For win32 by all means use Turbo Delphi. The Lazarus community is small so the less people to support the better.

BTW, is Turbo Delphi availbale for windows 64 bits.

Phil

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2737
Re: with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #3 on: June 09, 2007, 05:43:59 pm »
Quote from: "AkiFoblesia"
i do not intend to start a flame war.



Just use both and decide for yourself which is more appropriate for any particular project.

The more compilers and the more platforms you run your code against, the more likely it is that you'll find bugs.

It's not difficult to maintain a single codebase that you can compile with Delphi on Windows and with Lazarus on Windows, OS X and Linux.

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/XDev_Toolkit

felipemdc

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *
  • Posts: 3538
RE: Re: with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #4 on: June 09, 2007, 07:03:07 pm »
This kind of question "Is X or Y better?" is basically unanswerable, and also pointless.

Different projects have different requirements, so different tools will be more appropriate. No single tool will be the best available on all cases and serve to solve all problems on the works better then anything else.

Each different project will have a different answer for this question.

bee

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 393
-Bee-

A long time pascal lover.

Zaher

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 679
    • parmaja.org
RE: Re: with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #6 on: June 11, 2007, 02:44:12 am »
Turbo Delphi or Delphi 2007?.

Quote

- far more buggy
- less expert advise
- less programs available that show credibility

This is temporary things or unreal.

antonio

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 605
RE: Re: with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #7 on: June 16, 2007, 07:49:08 pm »
The Win64 support  is a strong point, Lazarus license too. In Latin America Linux is very popular and sometimes  Lazarus comes together on a package. It's very easy to download last stable version of Lazarus in several download brazilian sites too. So our brazilian forum is the second in the world.

Maybe it's so for Delphi and Turbo Delphi too, which run under Wine on Linux, so crossplatform feature of Lazarus isn't so important here. You can make a Delphi program to run on Linux under Wine. Lazarus, Delphi and Turbo Delphi share space with Java and C++.

Linux is used mainly on small businesses beyond state and academic uses. There are some big companies which have their own Linux distributions. There is some piracy of Delphi, which tends to diminish,  and use of Lazarus tends to increase because of this, and because of the advantages of Lazarus license. For daily work people use both Lazarus and Delphi, sometimes writing in Delphi and compiling with Lazarus.

I think it's the same in other parts like Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.

Lazarus is growing so support tends to be important. It's important to a professional tool. However I guess it will be up to each local forum.

I think that another strong point to Lazarus is the open source feature. This brings the credibility that a long list of applications would do, since you can see the code. Open source also moves away suspicions of piracy or spyware. While Lazarus emulates Delphi's IDE, Borland tries to emulate open source. Perhaps this works fine for a while.

Another amazing feature for non-english language people is the translated IDE.

OpenOffice is popular now and people feel encouraged to try Lazarus as well.

So, why Lazarus? Because its license is better, you can make your program to run on Linux and it's open source. Lazarus has a real chance to be the standard on these parts of the world. There's a marketing case to be studied in Brazil.

BuffaloX

  • New Member
  • *
  • Posts: 10
with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #8 on: June 24, 2007, 11:17:32 am »
I used to love Delphi and was very impressed when Delphi 2 came out.
But Delphi has been skipping sideways ever since IMO. Never really improving in areas that has my interest.

The free version has gotten worse from what I understand, and the License is quite restrictive IMO.
I only program a little for fun, so I don't want to pay the steep price for Delphi,
But I don't want something that doesn't really work either.
Delphi trial versions doesn't really work because of limitations and restrictions IMO.
I never understood why Borland didn't make a reasonably priced single user version, without all the corporate junk, but one that supported multimedia, directX and OpenGL better. It could have been HUGE I think.

The latest couple of years I used Windows, I had stopped doing any programming altogether,
I felt like all the fun had gone out of it. MS was dominating the market completely, and I don't like their tools. ( Slow compilers, loads of bugs, hidden info you have to pay to get access to, zero innovation )
Still MS is the authority in the Windows World, so they can't be ignored.

Since I ported to Linux, and discovered Lazarus FPC, I have completely lost interest in Delphi and Windows.

I actually FEEL the freedom I heard "Linux Zealots" preaching about.
Maybe I'm even becoming a zealot myself, because I think the new scheme from MS about offering free programming tools, is to prevent people from using Linux compatible tools. Am I getting paranoid?

All in all, if you like Delphi, you can use it "as is".
Or if you like Lazarus, you can either use it "as is" or
Join in on improving it, and changing it so it better fits your needs.

The choice is yours...

Farshad

  • New member
  • *
  • Posts: 9
with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #9 on: June 27, 2007, 11:36:21 pm »
Free Turbo Delphi aka Turbo Delphi Explorer doesn't allow adding 3rd party components and it is a very big limitation if you want to do something commercial. The biggest advantage of Lazarus is its CrossPlatform capability.

LazaruX

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 597
  • Lazarus original cheetah.The cheetah doesn't cheat
with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #10 on: June 29, 2007, 09:37:41 am »
Quote

lazarus disadvantages against free turbo delphi:
- far more buggy


The programmers that programmed Delphi are professionals which have studied for their work,
Lazarus has been created by single users who not about programming, these users aren't always experts, haven't always studied programming, but still contributed to Lazarus.
Also remember that Lazarus isn't even at its first version, and it already has a lot of capabilities.

Quote

You can make a Delphi program to run on Linux under Wine.

Not all application work on Wine, and also, when it work its wine that lets your application work, not Delphi.

LazaruX

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 597
  • Lazarus original cheetah.The cheetah doesn't cheat
with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #11 on: June 29, 2007, 09:39:58 am »
.

LazaruX

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 597
  • Lazarus original cheetah.The cheetah doesn't cheat
with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #12 on: June 29, 2007, 09:50:16 am »
X

antonio

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 605
with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #13 on: July 15, 2007, 10:17:02 pm »
People see Lazarus as a high quality tool, which is not entirely functional yet.

Almindor

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 412
    • http://www.astarot.tk
with free turbo delphi out there, why lazarus?
« Reply #14 on: July 15, 2007, 10:41:24 pm »
I wouldn't call Delphi programmers "experts". They did a lot of good, and a lot of unimaginably stupid decisions in the past which still haunt us. Borland started off with better developers, but that doesn't mean they still have them. The main guy was hired by M$ I think for example, and many probably left. I wouldn't be surprised if most of them today are new people. Sure they got experience in the field yada yada, but I wouldn't say that they are more skilled than FPC/Lazarus creators. FPC and Lazarus achieved a lot on itself which isn't quite visible by the user. Borland had it much easier concentrating on one platform.

The main difference is that with OSS (no matter which project) you will never get the big polish going on, so it's always possible to find bugs, on the other hand the good news is that you can usually get them fixed (even if you're not a programmer/skilled enough, just being helpful, providing backtraces etc.) quite soon, which for me is more important (it's horrible to find a bug in closed source because you can't do much about it for months at least).

 

TinyPortal © 2005-2018