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two statistical questions
Witek257:
Hi. Writing a middle size application in Lazarus, I met with a problem. Solving it, I had to deep into fpc units source code. I found the bug in one of them, but what is more important, I found that rather simple task was coded in very complicated and messy way.
I’ve some experience in programming and found Lazarus+fpc a very interesting project, but before devoting to this project I would like to find answers to two questions:
how wide fpc and Lazarus are used (not exact statistic, but some estimates)
how often applications made with fpc and Lazarus are written for more than one system
Thaddy:
First: show us the very complicated and messy way? Cross-platform code is not necessary messy. We really would appreciate it if you show us where?
Second: the only way to guestimate the use is to look at the number of downloads, but even that is susceptible to wrong interpretation since e.g. the major Linux distributions provide their own FPC/Lazarus packages. And there are secondary outlets, like CodeTyphon. And people like me build everything from SVN (both fixes and trunk) and don't download distro's. There are *a lot of* people who build from source.
My guess is: on a cross-platform basis several 10.000th of users. On a professional basis (also occasional) several high 1000's, may be 10.000's. Installed base is much larger. It is not niche but neither is it main stream. Like the language itself.
The reason behind this is mainly the prohibitive cost of new Delphi licenses and the maturity of both FPC (for a long time) and Lazarus (by now). And a really active community.
Simply put: I do not know of any proficient professional Delphi programmer who is not using FreePascal at some point.
Mark Twain is still right insofar as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics
LacaK:
--- Quote from: Witek257 on May 30, 2016, 10:34:33 am ---I found the bug in one of them, but what is more important, I found that rather simple task was coded in very complicated and messy way.
--- End quote ---
No one is perfect! :)
If you find a bug please report (and if you can fix it, provide patch) at http://bugs.freepascal.org
Thaddy:
Some influential people are actually reading this ;), so some off-the record and therefore highly suspicious extra "statistical" information: The amount of current Delphi subscriptions are less than 50.000 (this is my high estimate of the actual mentioned numbers by the source) world wide as per my source. The amount of current Delphi users is much, much higher (at least 2.000.000). Now I'd say my previous suggestion is about spot-on.
BeniBela:
--- Quote from: Witek257 on May 30, 2016, 10:34:33 am --- I found the bug in one of them, but what is more important, I found that rather simple task was coded in very complicated and messy way.
--- End quote ---
That is so typical for Lazarus
Like every other class that needs to sort something implements its own QuickSort. Half a dozen implementations of the same algorithm. Or perhaps it was a dozen?
Last week I wanted to finally drop the LCL dependency, but I was still using a function to copy a directory. I thought I just copy that function to my unit. After digging through 7 files and thousands of lines, I gave up and just wrote my own function with a tenth of the length.
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