With Lazarus and FPC I don't need Delphi anymore
. I see only few missing elements in comparison with Delphi:
-Project Manager with Projects Group (my next TODO)
It seems to be the next ToDo for many people. You were not the first one to mention it.
Don't do anything for it before consulting Mattias. I have understood he already has code for it but has not committed yet.
I will write to him. There is a danger that people make duplicate effort without knowing about each others' work.
-Anonymous Methods
-Generics bug fixes and Generics.Collections
as part of FPC RTL/Lazarus
-RTTI.pas and few low level details
We have a little different priorities. I think Lazarus misses badly :
- Projects Group (already mentioned)
- Solid and easy Unicode support
- Integrated Pascal debugger to get rid of GDB and its bugs + limitations
- A way to search and install online packages from global repositories
However the biggest problem for many projects will always be the lack of:
- High quality 3rd party components!
The open source multiplatform system is problematic for component vendors, most of them do not support Lazarus.
It also prevents converting most Delphi projects to Lazarus, even if we make LCL perfectly compatible with VCL.
On the other hand open source process provides many benefits for development. There will be more high quality open source components, too (hopefully).
This all means that both Delphi and Lazarus will have place in the world also in the future.
What more, all the current and future forks of Lazarus will have place in the world, too. The essence of open source is to copy and improve other people's code, and publish it for others to copy. Let's follow it! Let's copy and improve shamelessly.
(For more info about the essence of GPL, please read the history about why Richard Stallman created it.)