If you have developed in Pascal or Delphi in the past decades, you’re probably familiar with the Lazarus IDE that provides an interface to the Free Pascal Compiler (FPC), much like Delphi’s IDE. For users of Lazarus IDE there’s now an exciting new development, with the announcement that FPC and Lazarus now support dynamic packages.
The upshot of this is that you no longer need to rebuild the IDE if you want to add components, controls and Lazarus extensions. In addition you can use this same dynamic package feature in your own Pascal applications this way.
Naturally this is a great improvement, and it’s good to see more improvements to such a venerable programming language. Not only is it still being used today for just about anything, including web development, but there is a good case to be made for using Pascal today as it’s no longer the language it was half a decade ago.
We’d also be remiss to not mention the legacy of [Niklaus Wirth], who not only created Pascal, but was also instrumental in the development of Object Pascal together with Apple. This effort ultimately led to everything from Turbo Pascal to Delphi, FPC and so much more, making it a heartening sight to see this legacy being kept alive today.
Oh, Lazarus! I remember Lazarus! That not-quite Delphi alternative!
Just like Gambas was (not quite) for VB6 programers!
I’ve used Lazarus to write little programs with it for Mac OS X Tiger!
But I remember it was a bit tricky to find the right FPC version that matches the IDE.
Back then I wished that Kylix had a BSD port with Carbon/Cocoa application support (Mac OS X was built on Darwin).
Being able to compile existing Delphi projects (using VCL or old OWL) on Mac OS X (or Mac OS 9.x) would have been cool!
I’m thinking of late 2000s, btw, when Tiger and Classic Environment still mattered in daily use.