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Author Topic: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?  (Read 20303 times)

Joanna

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #165 on: May 12, 2025, 12:49:13 pm »
Visual Lab did you ever consider that wasting energy and making heat is being deliberately ? Just about everything modern is extremely wasteful.
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Khrys

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #166 on: May 12, 2025, 01:15:25 pm »
Visual Lab did you ever consider that wasting energy and making heat is being deliberately ? Just about everything modern is extremely wasteful.

What makes you think the inefficiency of (much of) modern software is deliberate? "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", or rather laziness. CPU cycles and memory have become so cheap and abundant that writing properly optimized software is often less economically favourable than just throwing more RAM at the problem and calling it a day.

JD

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #167 on: May 12, 2025, 02:24:19 pm »
CPU cycles and memory have become so cheap and abundant that writing properly optimized software is often less economically favourable than just throwing more RAM at the problem and calling it a day.

And it will certainly continue until we have a supply chain crisis like what happened during the last pandemic when all of a sudden, we could no longer get cheap RAM to upgrade our computers because everything came from Asia. So for about 3 years I was forced to make things work fast with limited memory on legacy machines. Now it is business as usual again.  :(
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Lenny33

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #168 on: May 12, 2025, 04:11:40 pm »
Visual Lab did you ever consider that wasting energy and making heat is being deliberately ? Just about everything modern is extremely wasteful.
And it will certainly continue until we have a supply chain crisis...
I was forced to make things work fast with limited memory on legacy machines...
Now it is business as usual again.  :(
Evolution is unstoppable.
Some fly needs ~100,000 neurons for its tasks. But a human needs ~86 billion.
And the brain uses a lot of energy. But I'm not sure that most people on the Earth use such a complex brain properly and with maximum efficiency.

Do you think the fly brain is more efficient? Evolution (or God) should have stopped at the fly brain?
Why do you need more if the fly-like brain can send command of how to run/fly, eat and poop too?
And some “Seenkao” from the "heavenly office" will even be able to manually optimize your fly brain up to 50,000 neurons.
But maybe you will sometimes poop not in proper time if he makes a mistake.
(Seenkao, please do not offense. It is just for fun :D)
« Last Edit: May 12, 2025, 04:48:45 pm by Lenny33 »

VisualLab

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #169 on: May 12, 2025, 09:01:25 pm »
Visual Lab did you ever consider that wasting energy and making heat is being deliberately ? Just about everything modern is extremely wasteful.

What makes you think the inefficiency of (much of) modern software is deliberate? "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", or rather laziness.

I wanted to write the same thing :)



CPU cycles and memory have become so cheap and abundant that writing properly optimized software is often less economically favourable than just throwing more RAM at the problem and calling it a day.

And it will certainly continue until we have a supply chain crisis like what happened during the last pandemic when all of a sudden, we could no longer get cheap RAM to upgrade our computers because everything came from Asia.

Exactly. The question is whether this will be forced by some political event (such as the US-China conflict), a technological problem (a problem with achieving a larger scale of integration and/or with more effective heat dissipation) or government enforcement (e.g. the EU will order the use of "green" computers and "green" software).



Visual Lab did you ever consider that wasting energy and making heat is being deliberately ? Just about everything modern is extremely wasteful.
And it will certainly continue until we have a supply chain crisis...
I was forced to make things work fast with limited memory on legacy machines...
Now it is business as usual again.  :(
Evolution is unstoppable.
Some fly needs ~100,000 neurons for its tasks. But a human needs ~86 billion.
And the brain uses a lot of energy. But I'm not sure that most people on the Earth use such a complex brain properly and with maximum efficiency.

Do you mean changes in IT? That it supposedly works the same way as in the case of living organisms in nature? No, it absolutely does not. Evolution is a blind natural mechanism. Nobody controls it. However, changes in IT are a process that is controlled by people. And it is not always development (changes - yes, development - not necessarily). These changes are forced by groups of decision-makers in IT corporations. Decision-makers do not do it for the good of programmers (i.e. workers in their corporations). They do not do it for the good of users either. They make decisions that, in their opinion, will give them the highest profits with the lowest possible costs (whenever possible, they pass these costs on to others). And they are usually very short-sighted, rarely thinking long-term. That is why the technical solutions used are not always optimal (e.g. in terms of energy consumption, length of failure-free use, etc.).

So where some people make changes, other people can influence those changes (stop, slow down, or redirect) or implement counter-changes.
« Last Edit: May 12, 2025, 09:10:44 pm by VisualLab »

LV

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #170 on: May 12, 2025, 09:03:42 pm »
To move the conversation, sorry, from idle chatter to a practical proposal, write code in any programming language: C++, Fortran, Julia, Pascal. Since I started giving this example, let's multiply two dense square matrices 3000x3000. Compare the execution speed with a library, for example, OpenBLAS, which uses low-level optimizations.
The conditions are as follows:
1. The code does not contain manual low-level optimizations, only compiler optimizations.
2. The code must be available for verification.
3. It is desirable to use non-commercial compilers.
I believe this test will determine if modern compilers generate code that is better than the code produced by OpenBLAS programmers.

Lenny33

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #171 on: May 12, 2025, 09:42:24 pm »
Evolution is a blind natural mechanism. Nobody controls it. However, changes in IT are a process that is controlled by people.
You are now trapped in your own logic.
Perhaps you did not study philosophy and logic at university.

If (according to you evolution is a blind natural mechanism) and (at the same time people are product of this blind natural mechanism) then
  all evolutionary development of mankind and everything that is produced by man  := is also a product of a blind evolutionary process; // Just on a new level.

So the constant need for more memory and faster CPU is also part of a blind evolutionary mechanism.
Because the constant race to develop more convenient development tools to create more and more powerful and attractive but CPU/Memory-greedy applications is also a part of blind evolutionary mechanism.
Accept it ;)
« Last Edit: May 12, 2025, 09:58:06 pm by Lenny33 »

Lenny33

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #172 on: May 12, 2025, 10:50:10 pm »
Dear all, we can talk about “Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?” for a long time.

Personally, I don't care about Pascal future at all. I know and use C# for other projects as well right from 2009.
The only few things I really still like in Pascal is “set of” and “class of” and may be little more freedom in object construction (f.ex. I do not must call "inherited" in the first line).
And in comparison with C++ Pascal of cause is much more convenient and safe in many aspects, but unfortunately it doesn't have such a code speed and such a huge community.

But if MS would be a little more consistent and if they had officially released WPF-like interfaces for Linux and mobile platforms 10-15 years ago
then I wouldn't be on Delphi/Lazarus side for a long time.
I am convinced that anyone who has ever used LINQ for Objects in his daily work will hardly want to go back to the usual routine loops.

So IMHO the only thing Lazarus(FPC) is really handy and useful for now is in quickly and easily creating fast cross-platform desktop interfaces.
If an application doesn't need modern interfaces with a bunch of animated transitions and other whizzes, Lazarus makes it easy and fast enough for all major platforms.
And it is really great.
Whether young people will learn Pascal just for fast cross-patform interfaces - I'm not sure. Most university graduates will prefer C++ and Qt. The rest will make popular WEB-interfaces in JavaScript.
But there will be a few who will try to do interface on Lazarus and they will like it. Especially since Project Fresnel as a new UI paradigm for Lazarus projects will probably appear soon.
« Last Edit: May 12, 2025, 11:53:49 pm by Lenny33 »

VisualLab

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #173 on: May 12, 2025, 11:00:56 pm »
Evolution is a blind natural mechanism. Nobody controls it. However, changes in IT are a process that is controlled by people.
You are now trapped in your own logic.
Perhaps you did not study philosophy and logic at university.

My modest education is quite enough for me :) Knowledge can also be acquired from books.

If (according to you evolution is a blind natural mechanism) and (at the same time people are product of this blind natural mechanism) then
  all evolutionary development of mankind and everything that is produced by man  := is also a product of a blind evolutionary process; // Just on a new level.

What you wrote is very reminiscent of so-called "over-intellectualized" pseudo-philosophical books or movies - it is so naive.

So the constant need for more memory and faster CPU is also part of a blind evolutionary mechanism.
Because the constant race to develop more convenient development tools to create more and more powerful and attractive but CPU/Memory-greedy applications is also a part of blind evolutionary mechanism.

If this were true, other species would also be highly developed and would have created some civilizations. Do you see any other than humans? Yes, some people do not control their fate, they behave like animals (they follow their instincts), but not all. Therefore, for many biologists and anthropologists it is a mystery how consciousness in humans and the desire to change their lives, sometimes/often against instincts, came to be.

Accept it ;)

I don't think of following your demands, because your deduction is wrong.

Lenny33

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #174 on: May 12, 2025, 11:28:24 pm »
What you wrote is very reminiscent of so-called "over-intellectualized" pseudo-philosophical books or movies - it is so naive.
That I wrote is not "pseudo-philosophy", but a simple deduction based on your own logical postulates. In a mathematical analogy, I might call it extrapolation.
According to your own arguments, you yourself are a product of blind evolution.
Then why do you think that the products of your life activity are not the continuation of blind evolution? They exactly are. Like an anthill or a hive in the insect world.

If this were true, other species would also be highly developed and would have created some civilizations. Do you see any other than humans? Yes, some people do not control their fate, they behave like animals (they follow their instincts), but not all. Therefore, for many biologists and anthropologists it is a mystery how consciousness in humans and the desire to change their lives, sometimes/often against instincts, came to be.
And this is where you contradict yourself. But this is already good, because the classical ideas of self-generation and evolution are still just a theory.
All experiments on self-generation have failed and no transitional forms have been found.
So again, it's not far to accepting the creation theory. But this is another conversation and not for this thread  ;)


Closer to our topic, Moore's law no longer works as it did 20 years ago and soon we'll run into the physical limitations of transistors.
But it is likely that extensive development will continue for a very long time.
And those who like to save every byte and every CPU cycle now and in the near future will be needed more on embedded controllers than on the desktop apps.
But if only for save CPU cycles then in the game engine creation or in the high perfomance computation tasks (where is С/C++ is still the king).
« Last Edit: May 12, 2025, 11:48:16 pm by Lenny33 »

Joanna

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #175 on: May 12, 2025, 11:33:32 pm »
I think there is an assumption about evolution that organisms will always improve but it’s really not that at all. Evolution is more like adaptation, survival of the fit. What qualifies as fit can change in unexpected ways.

The discovery of cheap fossil fuels has had widespread consequences which are quite analogous to what is starting to happen with computing. To summarize, people who are competent and know how to craft things are being replaced with less skilled labor far away and the products transported long distances. Unlike visual lab I’m. Going to put the blame on people who accept this garbage because without them it would not be happening.

It’s the majority of people who prefer junk food in colorful packaging. It is manufactured from poor quality materials by strangers far away in a highly energy intensive process. Modern software is the equivalent of junk food. It is colorful and has fancy packaging and is intended to be consumed quickly and thoughtlessly.

Most people do not want to craft their own stuff because it’s time consuming. They would rather consume junk even if better options are available because junk is new and has more flavor and colors and features. 

The experiment of what will happen with software has not yet concluded but what happens to humans who eat junk foods has. The results are bloating, rotten teeth and in many cases early death caused by the unnatural ingredients.

Junk software has already captivated much of the population who can’t stop staring at their screens and pay attention to what is happening in the world around them. They are stupefied.
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Lenny33

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #176 on: May 13, 2025, 12:06:46 am »
The experiment of what will happen with software has not yet concluded...
Junk software has already captivated much of the population ...
I am not Nostradamus, but somehow I think that the next step will be to integrate computer hardware directly into the human brain and connect to a common database with AI.
So you and I will remember the current times with good nostalgia. And all current "junk software" will seem like children's toys. Although most current adepts of Pascal will probably not live to see it due to their age.

Joanna

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #177 on: May 13, 2025, 12:38:48 am »
Anyone foolish enough to get a computer in their brain will likely get all of their memories harvested by ai bots. Getting ddos attacks on brain would likely cause death.
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JD

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #178 on: May 13, 2025, 12:49:21 am »
I am not Nostradamus, but somehow I think that the next step will be to integrate computer hardware directly into the human brain and connect to a common database with AI.
So you and I will remember the current times with good nostalgia. And all current "junk software" will seem like children's toys. Although most current adepts of Pascal will probably not live to see it due to their age.

Sounds like you'll like the ideas of Ray Kurtzweil, the singularity and the human-machine interface (HMI) to name a few. Personally, I don't see that as progress, nor do I think it will be beneficial for the human race in general. I lean more towards Isaac Asimov in that regard. Besides, I honestly think that AI will prove to be too resource hungry, and we'll have to temper our expectations of what we can get from it.
« Last Edit: May 13, 2025, 12:53:03 am by JD »
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VisualLab

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Re: Why isn't Lazarus / Free Pascal more popular?
« Reply #179 on: May 13, 2025, 01:10:59 am »
What you wrote is very reminiscent of so-called "over-intellectualized" pseudo-philosophical books or movies - it is so naive.
That I wrote is not "pseudo-philosophy", but a simple deduction based on your own logical postulates. In a mathematical analogy, I might call it extrapolation.

Extrapolation is not always right. It is used by making certain assumptions that may not necessarily be correct or fulfilled. For example, we assume that the curve outside the measurement range (forward or backward) will follow a similar course to the trend line determined from the measurement points. Meanwhile, this may not be true, because we don't have any data to confirm it. So extrapolation is always a bit of speculation.

According to your own arguments, you yourself are a product of blind evolution.
Then why do you think that the products of your life activity are not the continuation of blind evolution? They exactly are. Like an anthill or a hive in the insect world.

Because I am aware of what I am doing. You know very well that consciousness in different living organisms (insects, vertebrates, and in particular many mammals, primates and finally humans) has different degrees. You've gone way overboard with simplifying this issue.

If this were true, other species would also be highly developed and would have created some civilizations. Do you see any other than humans? Yes, some people do not control their fate, they behave like animals (they follow their instincts), but not all. Therefore, for many biologists and anthropologists it is a mystery how consciousness in humans and the desire to change their lives, sometimes/often against instincts, came to be.
And this is where you contradict yourself. But this is already good, because the classical ideas of self-generation and evolution are still just a theory.
All experiments on self-generation have failed and no transitional forms have been found.
So again, it's not far to accepting the creation theory. But this is another conversation and not for this thread  ;)

What do you mean by self-generation? Because I didn't write anything like that. I only wrote about the creation of civilization by humans. That's not self-generation.

And one more thing - you use the term: theory. In the world of science, a theory is a description of a phenomenon or process that has been thoroughly studied. Mathematical models are often part of a theory (especially in physics). You probably meant a hypothesis (assumption) based on a certain set of premises (which may be incomplete or fragmentary). Only, hypotheses are tested (verified) by conducting research (sometimes it takes a really long time). And either theories are created from them (when the results of research confirm these assumptions) or they are rejected as false (e.g. the ether or phlogiston hypothesis).

Closer to our topic, Moore's law no longer works as it did 20 years ago and soon we'll run into the physical limitations of transistors.
But it is likely that extensive development will continue for a very long time.

Yes, but this so-called "Moore's Law" is more of a lapidary statement (although to some extent it was quite accurate) than an actual law of physics. Besides, physicists have known for a long time that one day people would "hit the wall" in terms of miniaturization of transistors. It was just a matter of time.

Just check what size the smallest transistor currently is and compare it to the size of a silicon atom. And the smallest possible transistor will definitely have to be larger than the size of an atom (Si).

And those who like to save every byte and every CPU cycle now and in the near future will be needed more on embedded controllers than on the desktop apps.
But if only for save CPU cycles then in the game engine creation or in the high perfomance computation tasks (where is С/C++ is still the king).

It's hard to say what will happen in a few years. You can make assumptions, but they are always just speculation.

 

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