Lazarus

With nearly 25 years of experience with the various versions of Delphi, I was looking forward to continuing with Lazarus in my retirement. I moved to linux many years ago, so install Lazarus and FPC. However as soon as I try to run a program I get the (seemingly common) error about missing FastHTMLParser. Ok, so nothing about that in the repos, and no complaints about missing dependencies during install. So over I go to your site to see if I can get any help. All I see is a pretty arrogant comment for someone else to just go search the forums for it. Well, guess what: plenty of mention of this problem in the forums, but no answers I could find. Solution: Complete uninstall of Lazarus, FPC, and back to good old Eclipse with Java. I just can't spend hours & days trying to get something like this working. I know some people say it works out of the box, but on my brand new installation of Linux Mint 19.3, that just doesn't happen. When I see less dismissive comments from your team, and better documentation regarding installation and missing dependencies, I may well revisit Lazarus.

Lazarus has some fine points when it comes to using a single platform version. But its cross compiling capabilities are poorly documented and just are not worth the effort, no matter how you try to build a cross platform executable, even on Windows 32.64. It would appear the authors either don't test the same code they post, or have not done a clean install for quite some time. If you install Lazarus on Windows 64, it is impossible to build a Win32 executable. If you look at Free Pascal, the compiler engine, you will notice the compiler installs in \lazarus\fpc within lazarus, and in \FPC within free pascal. If you use the fpclazupd program, the fpc compiler installs into \development\fpc and lazarus installs into \development\lazarus. Too many inconsisteices, too many poorly or undocumented features. Just not worth the bother. Too bad for such a nice product. Wiki is out of date and little information on web. Those five star ratings must be from the authors, people who don't cross compile, or friends of the authors. Cross compilers get an F- for useability.

Aweful!!! this program proclaims write once compile anywhere. I have kept trying several projects and each one has been SO difficult to compile on even 32/64 bit windows that I just gave up each time in favor of a PROPER IDE. PGSQL and Lazarus is like pulling teeth from the very beginning. I honestly don't know why you would favor this to mono/python for cross development. Any one who says this is better than VS needs a head check! Worst IDE Ever!

It's ok, but buggy on Ubuntu 11 and a little old fashioned. I wrote a fairly detailed review on my blog http://wp.me/peIz1-9p and although I personally like Lazarus it doesn't really stack up against something like monodevelop :(