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Free Pascal 2.0 Released

Posted by timothy on from the collect-the-whole-set dept.

Eugenia writes "After five years of development, Free Pascal 2.0 is ready and it includes support for many architectures and OSes. It now has threading support, interfaces, widestring and better Delphi support among many other new features. OSNews posted an article introducing the updated GPL compiler." petermgreen adds a list of some of the major changes since the last stable release: "Much better support for Delphi language features (especailly method pointers); more supported CPUs (AMD64, SPARC, PPC (32 bit), ARM) and platforms (Mac OS classic, Mac OS X, MorphOS, Novell Netware); a new and better structured Unix RTL Threading support; and a large number of internal changes including rewriting large parts of the compiler to make it more maintainable and easier to port to new architectures," and notes that "Visual parts of Delphi are being handled by a seperate project known as lazarus, which has not yet reached 1.0 but should do so fairly soon."

1 of 451 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Out of curiousity... by SAN1701 · · Score: 5, Informative
    First, I have to say I'm a big fan of Delphi. I've done dozens of projects with it in the last 10 years.

    Yes, I do use C++/Objective-C (when I have to program in OS-X with the Cocoa framework), and C# and Java. The productive gap I fell between the two first C-like languages is that, in Delphi, the work is done in a tenth of the time, specially for GUI and Database-enabled apps. When compared with Java and C# I would say that the time spent is twice or three times lower in Delphi.

    Of course, the fact that I develop mostly in Delphi makes easier to me to be productive in this language. But I have a friend who went to work in a full-Java environment, being good at it to the point of being a lecturer, and he agree that the Java world is still way behind when it comes to RAD.

    Having said all of this, many windows applications are built in Delphi. Here's a list of only the most famous.

    Delphi is generally considered the best tool for development in Windows. Simply put, its strengths are:

    1. Complete OO language, including real properties that were now copied by C# (actually, chief architect of Delphi-1 and 2, Anders Heijlsberg, is doing the same role in MS for C#).
    2. Easy to use IDE.
    3. Targets Win32, .NET (and Linux if you use Kylix, which was somewhat abandoned by Borland).
    4. A complete and mature framework, the VCL, with thousands of free components available on the web.
    5. Compiled code (when in Win32), which generates executables comparable in speed to those in C++.
    So why isn't it more widely used? I would say that one thing is because of Borland is a tiny company when compared to MS or Sun. The other is that it is a proprietary tool. And the third, generally the most commented, is that Borland maybe didn't know how to sell it properly.