Hello hello. I've been using Pascal for programming and game development for somewhere in the realm of five years, mainly via Borland's Delphi products. Given their move to support .NET largely over Win32 I eventually found my way over to the Lazarus project. "Cross platform Delphi-like action? Alright!" I found myself exclaiming.
And I still am really excited. However, I was disappointed at some of the functionality crutches that have been at large for a while now. Some gripes are simply from my time spent with Delphi, though. Without further ado:
(For reference, I'm running Laz on Windows XP.)
- Compiling feels really slow. I know Delphi wasn't this slow, but it seems most likely that this is FreePascal's doing, and not Lazarus'.
- Lazarus doesn't seem to remember if I have modified the code since I last tried to run my program from the IDE (F9). Even if I make no modifications it still forces me to sit through the lengthy compilation process.
- Language settings. It seems that I can switch to any language other than English and the changes occur immediately and without flaw. However, when I try to switch back to English, Lazarus just ignores me -- I had to reinstall just to reset it.
- The 'Stop' feature (CTRL+F2) seems to be unresponsive when the currently running program is a little CPU-intensive. I find I have to either shrink the window down to a tiny size or minimize it before Lazarus will actually halt the program.
- Is there a way to remove the message 'The program has been terminated' when you Stop a debugged program?
- If I try to change the pop-up speed of the Code Completion, it outright refuses to perform Code Completion at all, until I reinstall Lazarus.
- Code Completion always adds the trailing semicolon when an item is selected from the list. I don't think Delphi forced one in all of the time -- it makes doing expressions like "Form1.Canvas.Brush.Colour := clBlue" awkward because I need to keep removing the extra semicolons as I go.
- No Code Completion for method parameters?
- I'm the kind of fellow that likes Delphi (or Lazarus, in this case) maximized, so that the component palette/menu extends across the whole width of the screen. However, whenever I run my program from within the IDE, it forces it back to its original windowed state. Argh!
All of that said, just because I focused on the bad doesn't mean that I don't notice and appreciate the good. I'm extremely impressed that a project of this calibre has managed to make something this complicated and intricate in such a short number of years.
I'm excited to watch Lazarus continued to develop, and seeing the aforementioned items cleared up would really go a long way in seeing Lazarus on more Pascal developers' desktops.[/list][/list]
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