Probably what you're seeing here in the RemObjects/Codegear deal is
evidence of larger trends taking place in the software industry:
(1) Continued consolidation, like in most industries. Codegear and
RemObjects both probably concluded that their .NET products were
going nowhere fast in a market dominated by VB.NET/C#, so they
figured joining up might help both of them.
(2) Continued standardizing on the dominant IDE's for most large
organizations, that is on Visual Studio, Eclipse or maybe XCode if
you're doing serious Mac work. This also frees up the compiler and
tool developers from having to do an IDE for their products.
(3) Continued mainstreaming of .NET as a development platform. I'm
seeing contracts and proposals now that require .NET.
Not sure if I understand the animosity toward Codegear. Without
Delphi, this site wouldn't exist. Codegear's new owners seem
eminently practical and pragmatic with deals like this.
It appears, though, that with this deal we've lost the free command-
line Oxygene Pascal compiler. It worked great with both .NET on
Windows and Mono on, say, OS X (see http://
wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Using_Pascal_Libraries_with_.NET_and_Mono).
Here's an odd page I happened upon by accident when googling for
something else:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Porting_Delphi_Clients_to_the_XO
This is somehow related to the One Laptop Per Child project, which
uses Linux, hence the need for Lazarus. What it tells me is that
Lazarus and Free Pascal are still seen as useful, but primarily for
use with legacy Delphi projects, not necessarily with new projects.
In light of above trends, does it make sense to talk about how
Lazarus and Free Pascal move into the future? For example, some
projects I've worked on lately could definitely benefit from things
like this:
- A version of SWIG that supports Object Pascal syntax, so we could
create Python (and possibly other) interfaces to our classes, not
just to generic C-type functions.
- A .NET strategy. I'm not suggesting a compiler that produces .NET
assemblies, but rather some way to use our classes with .NET, maybe
by wrapping them in a .NET assembly.
- Possible integration with the big IDE's.
Thanks.
-Phil
_______________________________________________
Lazarus mailing list
Lazarus@lazarus.freepascal.org
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
