Cross Platform suitability

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bronto:
Hello;

I've just recently stumbled upon the Lazarus Project and Free Pascal.

I am a software developer doing custom and shrinkwrap commercial applications; most of my commercial applications are cross platform, Win/Mac. I have historically used RADs such as Omnis and 4D. I have one Mac-only app I acquired from someone who (I think) used Think Pascal.

I am curious about the suitability of Lazarus/Free Pascal as a replacement for the above tools. The open source model has immense appeal for me as an IDE, since it would allow for fast corrections to bugs (which is a problem in 4D) and elimination of runtime fees (which is a problem in Omnis).

* Is Lazarus/Free Pascal mature enough to release high quality commercial applications of significant complexity?
* Does the "Cross Platform" part really work? What are the practical limitations of doing this?
* Can anyone point me to some cross platform example applications? Functional demos would suffice. My cross platfrom order of importance is 1) Windows, 2) Mac OSX, 3) Mac OS9, 4) Linux (for the future).
* What about my old Think application? It's not been compiled since the Mac 68k days. How big a job to convert this to modern Mac/Windows?

Thanks

Lightning:
Lazarus currently runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD and OSX(With GTK), it is not as good as Delphi but it's better than Kylix in many aspects, depending on what features you need, they might work or not, the simplest way is to test it, if it's not yet good enough for you then you should follow the project, report bugs, make some fixes until it will fully support the features you need.
Unfortunately i'm not familiar to any of the tools you mentioned earlier, Lazarus is usually compared to Borland tools like Delphi or Kylix :)

bronto:
I thought Lylix IS Delphi, but in open source form. Shows how much I know.

Omnis is typically thought of as being in the same class of software as PowerBuilder, although PB has lost serious momentum and mindshare since they were bought out by Sybase. Many others consider it a couple of steps up from Access and Visual Basic. It's really hard to pidgeon hole. It's a self contained cross platform/cross database 4GL RAD that approaches 3GL status as it keeps getting deeper. I really like it but I don't like the licensing issues. http://www.omnis.net

4D is, well, nothing is like 4D for better or worse. It's a client/server database where the server is tightly bound to a client interface. At least that's how most developers use it. It's not SQL at it's core, although you can use it's client to access SQL servers. And there are add-ons that allow non-4D clients to access the server through ODBC. But every data access approach requires a different coding method, so changing data sources pretty much requires a rewrite each time. But, if you follow it's paradigm, you can create nice applications really, really quickly. http://www.4d.com

Lightning:
Kylix shares part of the code with Delphi but runs on Linux using custom QT libs and Wine libs wich make it slow, there are no updates for Kylix and it has serious problems with newer Linux kernels, there will be no 64bit version either, Kylix uses CLX exclusively, while Delphi uses VCL and CLX, newer Delphi versions are not compatible with Kylix anymore as Borland is going to folow the .NET philosophy, Kylix has a so called "Open" version wich is NOT OpenSource but a stripped Free version wich can be used to make GPL applications only, you are not allowed to make commercial apps with Kylix.

Lazarus isn't like the tools you are currently using wich are more similar to VB than Delphi, check out the Lazarus screenshots, but it's a nice RAD tool wich allows making commercial applications and comes with sources and allows high and low level access just like Delphi :)

Just download it, install it and see what it can do.

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