Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Can Lazarus meet the goals of stdgui?

Can Lazarus meet the primary goals of stdgui?

First I should mention that Lazarus is a little different than the other toolkits in that it is written in Object Pascal.  I have a warm fuzzy place in my heart for Object Pascal because Borland's Delphi was my first earnest programming language & IDE.  It was a very productive environment back in the day - it's known as a RAD tool.

After installing Lazarus 1.0.10 I got all nostalgic because it all looked so familiar.  The Lazarus team has done a really excellent job of recreating Delphi.

Nostalgia aside, my interest in Lazarus is purely due to their apparent support for pretty much every toolkit I want: Windows, OSX, GTK and Qt.  The question is their support for these toolkits of sufficient quality and, if so, can Object Pascal code be wrapped in a C shared library easily?  This might put it as a contender to wxWidgets as a backend for stdgui.

1. Programming language independent?
No.  It's a big Object Pascal API.

2. Native rendering?
Yes.  Here is the state of support for different "widgetsets"

3. Rapid Development?
Yes.

Summary
I don't think any part of Lazarus will help with the implementation of stdgui.  I asked on their forum how feasible it would be to wrap the Lazarus Component Library in a C shared library.  The response was that it would be non-trivial and there would be some definite technical hurdles.  It had been attempted before but that project stalled.

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