Is Lazarus still being developed?

[Graeme]

I installed D5, and tried to compile some of my code. It failed. Obviously delphi is not quite there yet.

Yup. I installed Delphi XE, which took an hour and a half to install on a Intel i7 system. After the install it took 1-2 minutes to start the IDE. Every time I press F1 to get help, be that code or a component property, it always fails to find ANY help. Obviously Delphi is not quite there yet.

Oh yeah, and Delphi still doesn't support Linux, Solaris, Haiku, OS/2, RaspberryPi, FreeBSD.... and the list goes on. Nope, Delphi is definitely not there yet.

[Graeme]

I am **not asking** for help with anything.

In that case you will not learn anything. Lazarus IDE is not a Delphi IDE clone. Things work slightly different, or are named different or in different locations. But over all, Lazarus IDE is a lot more powerful than even the latest Delphi. LCL is designed to be VCL compatible, but again, not an exact clone. Why not a clone, well, because LCL needs to work on multiple operating systems, so things are inevitably going to be different under each platform (eg: OSX vs Windows vs GTK vs Qt). VCL only runs on Windows.

[guest58172]

@lainz: Where do I find the "trunk" whatever that may be?

Common people, don't over-react. If the guy doesn't know what is a trunk, what can you deduce ?!!
Probably the same as me: he's a ....

[bee]

A typical Delphi user. He got himself in too deep in the comfort zone.

As long as he thinks Lazarus is a Delphi clone and expects would behave exactly like Delphi (and VCL), I bet he wouldn't use Lazarus any time soon, if at all. Even if he will try Lazarus at some point, I bet he will whine about Linux and/or Mac because it's so different to Windows. And he would find another reason to keep using Delphi (and Windows).

While the latest Delphi today is only able to compile console program for Linux, Lazarus and FPC have been doing GUI stuffs on Linux since like ages ago. So, it's clear that Delphi isn't there yet. I'll wait for the next release and when it's free! Yeah, good luck with that!

[Akira1364]

Delphi essentially permanently lost its chance at being able to create post-Kylix Linux/Unix/Mac GUI applications as soon as it started using all the .NET 2.0 stuff in the IDE circa 2003 or so. Also, the most recent versions are completely dependent on MSBuild (as in it MUST be installed), for some reason. (I have nothing against MSBuild 14 or the current .NET 4.0+ Framework when I'm using them in conjunction with Visual Studo and C++/C#, but there was absolutely no good reason to ever adapt either of them into Delphi).

[Graeme]

Embarcadero keeps beating the drum that FMX (FireMonkey toolkit) is the future, yet Embarcadero itself doesn't implement any real-world applications using FMX.... like the IDE itself. If they did, they would have a cross-platform IDE at hand, they will discover all the bugs in FMX that developers have been complaining about for years. The future looks bleak for Delphi. Long live Free Pascal, Lazarus, MSEide+MSEgui, fpGUI and open source in general! I can't see how I will ever turn to commercial closed-source development tools again.

[Thaddy]

I will put it stronger than that: I have never seen a real world business application written in Delphi that used FMX.
If anyone has seen such a beast in the wild, plz send a screenshot. In this case even that is enough.

I have seen some pretty good Android apps, though, so it is not totally without merits.

[Thaddy]

Anyway: A serious Delphi 5 VCL application normally  does not even compile in Delphi Berlin without huge changes.
So check that first and then complain about Lazarus/fpc.
You will find that practically the only thing missing is anonymous methods... which Delphi 5 doesn't have either...