What is it with Lazarus? What Lazarus has and other IDEs don’t? For beginners, is it a good option? For switchers, would it be difficult to switch from other IDEs/Languages? - Read on to get the answers…
I recommend Lazarus as an IDE. Well, it is quite obvious, because this website is named after it, right? No. But mainly because Lazrus is open source, cross-platform and free as a bird. It is smoothly runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS and many platforms and cuts gigantic cubes of butter like a hot knife! Lazarus supports so many platforms where almost no IDE has gone before.
Lazarus allows you to graphically design your forms which is a delicacy to newbies through expert programers. Form designer makes it easier to create large scale (and small scale) softwares to be built with ease and peace of mind. Language is not religion. So new languages can be learned. Delphi and VisualBasic users will feel at home using Lazarus form designer and coding style. Delphi sources can be converted to Lazarus very easily and can be made cross-platform by tweaking the code a little bit.
IDE
IDE helps to make the writing of codes easier. IDE means Integrated Development Environment. It is a Software which is integrates itself with the programing language to make the coding easier. It does many things automatically. It saves a lot of your time and makes it easier to code. Modern IDEs such as Lazarus have got code auto complete feature, that lets you type many things by typing only the first few letters. Of course, you can use only a plain text editor like Notepad to code, but an IDE is a nice way to go for newbies. It also makes good use of your time since you need not to fiddle with tiny little compiler settings and configuration while quick-testing your piece of code.
Lazarus as an IDE
I found Lazarus to be the best IDE for programing cross-platform component-rich softwares that run on Windows/MacOS/Linux. It has a form designer by which you can design your software graphically. It is Free and open-source software (FOSS) and it uses FreePascal as the language which is also FOSS.
Lazarus in the Fish pond
Lazarus follows almost the same syntax, coding style, and interface of Delphi, a commercial IDE powered by Pascal. Delphi is known to be a friendly interface for developing software, so is Lazarus. Lazarus is also much similar with Visual basic (VB). If you are a VB user then you will be amazed how similar the coding process is. The form designer is quite similar to VB’s. Lazarus has the ability to link the libraries statically, which means you don’t need any dll files to go with your exe file. You don’t even need any extra Framework to run it. (Pheww! No more mind boggling 300 mb install for a 500kb exe file! Psst… .NET Framework)
If you ask, how capable is Lazarus, I will have to ask another question in return - do you know that Lazarus is made with Lazarus itself? Yes, it is true. Amazing isn’t it? So obviously it is capable of doing what C++ / C / C# codes can do. (See detailed Comparison)
Many uses
If you want to build Database applications then Lazarus is definitely a neat solution.
There are also plenty of commercial and non-commercial softwares built with Lazarus: http://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Application_Gallery The page features softwares ranging from winzip alternatives to media players to games to accounting softwares to painting programs to almost anything. If you learn Lazarus in your computer, you can build your own applications for your own needs in minutes!
So, get started here to use Lazarus with your programing life!
