On Fri, 26 Nov 2010, Frank Church wrote:
One thing that has always gottem to me when using Delphi and now Lazarus is the
tedious edit, compile, debug cycle. It has
been growing worse of late that now I am beginning to dread the whole process
any time I have to make some changes,
especially when they are just minor GUI changes.
I have to wait for what is now approaching 60Mb of debugging enabled exes to be
generated every time before debugging can
start and I'm afraid I am beginning to show signs of an ADD. I tend to approach
development with what I can do in the mean
time whilst stuff is cooking.
The problem is the is duration too long to be staring at the screen, and too
short to give something else your attention
before coming back to it.
Why do you think this is different from any other language ?
I did quite a lot of web programming lately. JSON, Javascript and stuff.
None of that went any faster than FPC/Lazarus, in fact, they
went lots slower.
Same with PHP. Worse even, because in PHP, you only notice
coding errors when the interpreter actually gets there.
It may go unnoticed for a long time. Javascript is even
worse. Give me compiled languages any day.
In my experience, the compile cycle is the least time consuming.
A couple of seconds, at most. No big deal.
Setting up test data, working through the login screen and several
other screens to get to the screen I'm actually testing:
this is the chore of debugging in 99% of the cases.
If you want to speed things up:
One thing which I've learned is that Test-Driven development makes the
debugging easier.
FPCUnit (or name any other testsuite) makes the debugging process faster:
1. You clearly separate business from GUI logic.
Once business logic is done, I'm pretty confident the code is OK.
2. The unit test apps compile quick and run quickly;
As soon as they've run, I know the cause of the failures;
There is seldom any need to actually debug.
What you may want to do is try and avoid windows when working with Lazarus.
Lazarus/FPC still works significantly faster on Linux.
Michael.
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