Lazarus Reviews

After some too lengthy encounters with Python and PyQT I remembered Lazarus again. I am close to 70 now and remember the active days using Delphi 3 a lot. The last time I had a look at Lazarus was when it was in the 0.5 version area. Now I was positively flabberghasted how this duckling developed into a grown up swan! After a short glimpse at the IDE I decided to give it a try. In the times of Delphi 3 and Paradox I was able to connect to a DB and produce a useful app within half a day. Ok, that was a chickens*** test app, but if gave me enough insight to see how fast development with a well designed tool can be. Now, the next important thing if you dive into something new is the documentation. Well, Delphi had a VERY well written documentation. This is where Lazarus is so weak I almost decided to send it to the scrapyard again! Oh, nice, I thought initially, there are some really useful tutorials around. Good, I don´t need lengthy explanations and the umpteenth book describing the same things I have read how many times before. I was a professional and I need exactly the right and correct information for my problem. Never have I been so disappointed before. ALL of the so called tutorials did NOT work. But... I wanted just to have a WORKING and very simple example how to connect to a simple SQlite DB and access some data in a grid or other data control. All these tutorials are lacking something: they do not work - at least not with the latest version of Lazarus. Why? I guess there were a lot of brilliant guys who had this brilliant idea some 10 or even 15 years ago to publish a nice little tutorial in the internet. But then reality rolled over them, jobs, dependencies and they never cared to test their work with the latest version. All of this is still around, mostly uncommented. I found a lot of deprecated stuff nobody updated ever since it was written. Ok, I´m an old dog, and I like my docs to be in written form. Written means book, but I don´t need the printed form. Ebooks give me a lot of insight, they are very practical to use. I understand a project like Lazarus which is still under development must be financed in a way. But, please, not this way: the books cost 40 and 50 USD and I don´t even know a bit about the quality. I did not mind a price like that in former times when I was working (books were tax deductible), but the most necessary support if you decide for Lazarus is and remains the documentation! If you call it FREE, the INFORMATION about the tool SHOULD BE ALSO FREE! This alone keeps a lot of potential users from using it. The information in the Wiki is quite good, but the quality Borland provided in the good old times is never reached. I know, developers hate documentation, I have been in the IT business long enough (since 1979) to know about that. But here with Lazarus the interested newcomer would need functioning, well explained demo projects which are REALLY working and periodically updated! I am sure plenty of interested persons (including those who decide in companies) are very disappointed and look for something better when they find out about the poor documentation / learning literature. Nobody is interested in wasting time - but this way you can waste a lot of it.

Best Free Delphi'like IDE out there. I can whip up a project in an afternoon, and have something to show by it! Way better than Visual Studio; however, I wish the debugging information was a bit better and more helpful.

I'm 70 years old now, I've started to programming in Turbo Pascal in 1983 then passed to Delphi until 2003 when I stopped programming. Now in my association of elders, we are organizing a library thanks to the donation of books and knowing my story as a programmer I was asked if I could take care of a program to catalog books. The challenge has begun! Finding Lazarus was a great pleasure. Installed on my Apple laptop (MacBook Pro 13" M1) I felt "at home" and slowly in about a week I managed to recover much of my skills and the program for the Library is taking shape. There were some difficulties in proceeding, but nothing that a good google search did not give me suggestions to proceed with patience and satisfaction. A big thank you to all the developers from an old rusty programmer.

Excelent for my needs.

Чудо IDE для создания приложений, web, МК.

Whatever was good in Delphi, once, back in the days, is included. Whatever Delphi has unfortunately become, is wisely omitted. Whatever was available as 3rd-party extension, is added. Lazarus seems to be the perfect development environment and the perfect tool to create Windows applications. Fast, easy, does the job, no-nonsense, no auto-create-everything-you-dont-need, no extra rounds before reaching your target. It's there. And the end you have an exe that just runs. I love it. Gave me back the feeling.

It's free, powerful and always followed

Ive been using this for my Windows applications since 2015. It compiles small, executes fast and there are no dependencies necessary.

Very good free IDE for Free Pascal.

Very nice work done by team

Lazarus is the best

I just love Lazarus, and can recommend it as the main development tool. It has become a serous development tool. As a former Delphi developer i switched over to Lazarus. The Lazarus IDE has become very nice, And it goes so fast to develop applications. Developing backend apps also goes fast. Like a http server. You could actually replace PHP as backend with your application. So many amazing components exists for Lazarus too, and super-easy to install. You can do the same as in Delphi, and many things is much better in Lazarus. You can also create your custom controls with a new package under a minute. Pascal has come a long way as a modern language. This has become my main development tool today.

It is great

Thanks for the quality development environment in a fairly simple language! Procedural approach = all actions are linear and within one procedure. A good set of libraries, which is richer than that of Embarcadero, they just sometimes do not even have an English description. Delphi code is easily optimized for freepascal. The only problem is with unicode, but it's easy to get used to special variables (for example, TStringListUTF8). A rich set of ready-made components for a visual form, even a child can create an outwardly attractive program. Very often updated, very active! I read somewhere "Lazarus raised Freepascal from the ashes" - a speech about the fact that freepascal was developing so inactively that it was rather abandoned, and now, thanks to Lazarus, releases began to come out. Спасибо за качественную среду разработки на довольно простом языке! Процедурный подход = все действия линейны и в рамках одной процедуры. Хороший набор библиотек, который богаче, нежели у ембаркадеро, просто у них порой даже не английском описания нет. Код с делфи легко оптимизируется под freepascal. Единственное, проблема с юникодом, но тут просто привыкнуть к особым переменным (например, TStringListUTF8). Богатый набор готовых компонентов для визуальной формы, даже ребенок сможет создать внешне привлекательную программу. Очень часто обновляется, прям очень активно! Где-то читал "Lazarus поднял из пепла Freepascal" - речь о том, что freepascal развивался настолько неактивно, что был скорее заброшен, а тут благодаря Lazarus стали выходить релизы.

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 + free pascal are a very good tool to see and learn to program in pascal, also their community forum and support is active

Buon tool

Hello, I use MsSql Server, My applications developed with Lazarus 2.0.6 using MsSql Server don't work. I have an error about dblib.dll not loaded. I return to the 2.0.6 version. Any idea ? Best regards

The Lazarus RAD IDE + Free Pascal Compiler = Cross-platform heaven. I can compile GUI applications on macOS for both macOS, Windows 32 bit and Windows 64 bit. I can compile the same source code for the same application on FreeBSD and on Ubuntu Linux. The Free Pascal Compiler Documentation is extensive and the Free Pascal and Lazarus Wiki serves a similar documentation repository for Lazarus along with the ever-helpful, and surprisingly welcoming to new users, Free Pascal and Lazarus Forums. I was a previous user of Delphi 1 through Delphi 7 and then my costly mistake spending substantial coin on Delphi 10.1 where bugs go unfixed for decades. Contrast that to Lazarus + FPC where I have had developers fix bugs I encountered OVERNIGHT. Needless to say, my coin now goes to supporting Lazarus + FPC.

im having trouble downloading deb file ..download comes to 60% and then aborts ..tried on windows/chrome and elementary OS/firefox. windows instaler works great all in all great work :)

I still give 5stars on this project, I hope they can add more feature for easier Database Related tasks; I would like to connect to MSSQL, MYSQL, PostgreSQL, and on recent updates the TDBGrid become unresponsive when display 1000+ rows coming from anysource, I hope they can fix this and add more feature for database functions

Lazarus - my favorite IDE

Excellent IDE Studio.

Excellent! Only for support I gave 4 stars because I miss the help of Delphi from 1990's. It always had an example that could be copy&pasted.

Tested so good!