On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 2:18 PM, Giuliano Colla via Lazarus <[email protected]> wrote: > > We're working in the field of automatic machines. From textile machines to > printer post-processing equipments (mainly in the security printers field), > from coffee roasting machines to chain wear monitoring equipment. We do not > usually deploy software, but rather we sell control equipments which are > then integrated by the final manufacturer in the machine. > > Our equipments usually include custom embedded controllers and a supervisor > which may range from an industrial grade PC to a Raspberry PI. It provides > both the human interface and the real-time high-level process control. > > We're also frequently asked to integrate our supervisor into the factory > data network both to provide production data (for statistical purposes, > quality assurance, and security) and to fetch process information when > appropriate. This leads to supplying also small servers which do handle > network protocols, Data Base handling, creating Reports etc. > > We found today's Object Pascal and Lazarus to be the most cost effective > solution, for a number of reasons. Mainly: > > - Object pascal syntax makes it easier to detect programmer errors at compile > time, thus strongly reducing the debug time. > - Being most projects quite similar and with very short development time > allowed, we need readable and self documenting sources, making it easy for > anyone to modify project A into project B. > - For the same reason, re-usability of code for us is a must. Again Object > Pascal is a winner by this POV. > - Always for the same reason we need a RAD tool, and Lazarus IDE is again a > winner. > - We need to interface with our real-time framework with predictable timing, > and this rules out most of the "modern" languages. > - Given the relative stability of the Object Pascal language, we may take > advantage of a huge amount of code we have developed in the past. I've just > ported to Lazarus a program which was originally developed in the 90's with > Delphi 3!
As we can see, we can do everything with Object Pascal. Unfortunately, the market don't have the same vision. > Many of those reasons apply also to Delphi, but we dropped Delphi long ago > because: > > 1. Primarily, we need Linux support, because of the real-time requirements, > which aren't achievable in Windows environment. OS-X isn't an option because > we need industrial grade PC's. > 2. Secondarily, Lazarus IDE is light years better than Delphi IDE. I totally agree with you about the second item. > For sake of completeness, I must add that our real-time framework and the > real-time tasks are written in C. This was a must when it had to be part of > a patched Linux kernel, running in kernel space. Now that RT_PREEMP has > reached maturity and has made its way into the mainline kernel we've been > able to move the stuff to user space. Therefore we're rewriting most of it > in Object Pascal, to take advantage of a much lower development and > maintenance cost. That is other excellent case study... Maybe we all could build a website to write those cases and provide more information about Object Pascal nowadays. Do you have problems to find new Pascal programmers? Regards, Marcos Douglas -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lazarus-ide.org/listinfo/lazarus
