from Hacker News

Lazarus Release 4.0

by proxysna on 5/7/25, 8:36 AM with 165 comments

  • by int_19h on 5/11/25, 9:37 AM

    Best part: a hello, world GUI app (a dialog with a textbox and a button that pops up a message box) is ~2.5 Mb on Win32.

    This was something like 500 Kb back in 2000, but it's still a far cry from your ~200 Mb Electron hello world.

  • by speakspokespok on 5/11/25, 9:43 AM

    Lazarus and Open Pascal is fun!

    And so it drives me crazy to see the state of their documentation. The wiki needs to be archived and replaced with a coherent documentation platform. It’s such a turn off. The whole website is a SWAG site frankly.

    ‘ SWAG sites

    SWAG is an archive of tips and example programs for Turbo Pascal/Borland Pascal and early Delphi. Much of it is still applicable to today's Object Pascal - and much is obsolete...’

    How can a language compete when a new user sees this?

  • by foldl2022 on 5/12/25, 6:27 AM

    Lazarus is still my favorite when developing desktop apps.

    Language is not a problem. Pascal is just C/C++ in another favor. LCL/VCL is a wonderful library, everything just works like what I am expecting.

  • by TiredOfLife on 5/11/25, 6:37 AM

  • by xvilka on 5/11/25, 11:12 AM

    At the same time it was deprecated[1] in Homebrew. Hope the mainstream will address the issue.

    [1] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask/pull/199559

  • by bigpeopleareold on 5/11/25, 12:47 PM

    I only toyed with Lazarus/Free Pascal. There was some things I couldn't get used to. Maybe time to toy around again :) I feel like mentioning a few things that helped in the past: fpcdeluxe for installing a build of fpc and lazarus and a plugin called anchordockingdsgn to get all the floating windows in one window. It would be nice if 4.0 defaulted to that. The Castle Engine Pascal tutorial was actually pretty good also (which is mentioned in another thread here.) (edit: for the plugin, I see an option in fpcdeluxe to dock all windows - so it's possible to build that plugin in initially.)

  • by ramon156 on 5/11/25, 11:11 AM

    It took way too long to figure out what Lazarus is based on their own website. Only found out because somewhere some random post said "Lazarus IDE".

  • by rantingdemon on 5/11/25, 12:37 PM

    It is a pity that Lazarus and FPC seems to be so hard to deploy. It is of course an open source project, so its understandable.

    Lazarus and FPC is a great project. Building GUI apps like with Lazarus does not have an easy alternative, from which I'm aware.

    I have tried it now on my Mac, and I have to jump through some hoops to get it going. Again a pity, its a great option.

  • by colechristensen on 5/11/25, 6:29 AM

    It would be great if release announcements like this always included a description of what the product actually is.

    >Lazarus is a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development. It has variety of components ready for use and a graphical form designer to easily create complex graphical user interfaces.

  • by rcarmo on 5/11/25, 9:35 AM

    Nice to see this, and I jumped on it immediately since I really wanted to do a minimal form-based UI to a tool I'm building, but on macOS I keep getting linking errors when compiling (on a fresh install, on a machine that never had Lazarus before).

    I guess I'll wait for the next minor.

  • by user3939382 on 5/11/25, 9:09 AM

    This was the name of a sadly gone Firefox extension that saved all your form field values automatically

  • by ogogmad on 5/11/25, 1:15 PM

    Have people tried combining it with better-supported languages like Python or Go or Rust, leaving only the GUI to Pascal? Any guides out there?

  • by zerr on 5/11/25, 7:50 AM

    > Windows: 2k, 32 or 64bit, Qt, Qt5, Qt6 (64bit only)

    Besides Qt, does it have a pure Win API back-end as well?

  • by fithisux on 5/11/25, 9:45 PM

    Can you suggest free resources for FreePascal and Lazarus?