Persistent MacOS Arm M chip linker error

[BVale]

🙂 The -WM option in the compiler is well known to anyone who wants to use dark mode in their apps.

I honestly lost count of how many times I tried to get Lazarus running properly on M1/M2 Macs. I asked for help in the forum, submitted bug reports — but to this day, there’s still no reliable solution for these issues.

In the end, I had to make a decision. I really wanted to keep using the software I had built with Lazarus, but I simply couldn’t compile it anymore because of IDE problems. And unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the devs are too interested in fixing this anytime soon.

Would’ve loved to stick with Lazarus. But at some point, things just have to work.

[Grahame Grieve]

I think that the community should be open about this: the MacOS version if Lazarus is unusable and the reasons that make it so are very long standing. I advise people who ask about it (through the Australian Delphi Users Group that although I like Lazarus, they should not even try.

Here's my reasons:
* the installation instructions are the most complicated of anything I've worked with, and don't work as is anyway. I shouldn't have to think about -WM10.15, let alone read through contradictory advice about how to make WM10.15. And I sure don't with any other tool

* even once you've got it installed, I have never seen docking work reliably enough to use the product in the last 4 years (and I can't understand how people can being to use Lazarus without docking)

* the debugging experience is woeful. In my case, Lazarus hangs for 5 minutes on the first or second breakpoint. And even if I wait that out, seeing variable values is hit and miss, and there's a reasonable chance that either my program or the debugger (or both) will stop working each time I hit step, such that it's reasonably likely it *will happen* by the time I've walked around the code.

There's various other issues, but these are my big problems, and they are enough to make me desperate to have time to refactor somehow. But I think I need to migrate to a different language and there's simply no way I can do that, so I'l have to persevere :-(

[Grahame Grieve]

Wait, update. I finally got the trunk version of Lazarus installed correctly, and docking works properly. Yay

I understand the challenges of an open source project (it's what I do), so I'm not complaining, though it sounds like it. I just think we should be honest