Malcolm Buckingham wrote:
I don't see a great point in using Lazarus for Windows-only
projects, at least for those that already did projects with
Delphi. At least for former Delphi users, portability is the
main reason for using Lazarus so this should be the primary
goal, even when thinking about Delphi compatibility.
-Michael
In my case this is *NOT* true; and I suspect it's not true for many Windows
users of Lazarus. In my previous company I used Delphi versions 3, 5 and 7.
Beyond version 7 there were too many compatibility issues with existing
code, and the price became too high.
Now that I'm self employed I have moved over to Lazarus/Free Pascal. This is
partly because of the cost but mainly because I'm comfortable with the IDE,
form designer and compiler. In many ways it is similar to the older versions
of Delphi; this is NOT meant as a criticism.
Points seconded.
Looking at the download statistics at SourceForge it seems that over 70% of
this year's downloads have been for Windows. Now, it may be that people are
using Windows to cross compile for Linux; but I doubt that it is very
common.
The customers I write software for are exclusively Windows based. For me it
might seem that having Lazarus cross-platform is a hindrance since the
developers are continuously having to deal with OS
differences/incompatibilities. In practice it probably makes Lazarus a
better product since more care has to take place during design.
Which applies to both Lazarus/FPC and to projects built using them: even
if targeting Windows, it's probably worth running a project through the
compilers for different platforms so that potential problems are at
least identified.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of programmers using Lazarus
are developing cross platform software. Unfortunately I suspect that answers
obtained via this list would be skewed towards multi-platform.
However, I think that you're confusing "cross platform" with "not using
Delphi's supported platform(s)". My own suspicion is that far more
people are targeting a single platform (Linux, BSD, potentially Android
etc.) than are seriously trying to make sure that their code runs on a
collection of different OSes and CPUs (with different word size,
endianness and alignment requirements).
Perhaps a straw poll either here or in lazarus-other is in order: "Of
what you consider your live projects, what percentage do you actively
maintain for more than one combination of OS and CPU?".
In my case I'd say about 75%, but I'm not shipping to customers these days.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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