[rcarmo]

I mentioned Lazarus in other threads a few days ago (since my kids are playing around with it) and it's great to see it as a top-level post. Some random thoughts:

- It's somewhat amusing to realize that in 2017 this is pretty much the easiest way to do a desktop app (besides RealBasic/Xojo which I've yet to try - was put off by their mandatory registration)

- I wish we had RAD environments like this for more languages (Racket, Python, etc. - even JS).

- On the Mac, installation is a bit fiddly. It needs a little polish and support (a standalone, integrated bundle would be better, or at the very least a unified installer).

- We've been retrofitting web UIs to desktops to such an extent (I'm looking at you, Electron) that the tiny, supremely efficient apps Lazarus spits out put the last couple of years into stark perspective (2GB RAM used by Slack, etc.)

I love Lazarus, and hope it helps resurrect the RAD approach for other languages - if anyone knows of any similar environments (besides QtCreator, etc.), could you share the links?

[dkersten]

I've not used Lazarus or Delphi, so I can't really compare properly. Perhaps I'm missing something. But:

> if anyone knows of any similar environments (besides QtCreator, etc.)

Why "besides QtCreator, etc"? It sounds to me almost like "do you know any X besides all of the popular X". Is there any particular reason you discount QtCreator? Does it not work for your purposes? Or is it just a case of you already know about it and want to hear about more obscure tools?

> It's somewhat amusing to realize that in 2017 this is pretty much the easiest way to do a desktop app

I've found Qt with QtCreator to be an incredibly productive way to develop desktop applications. Both old-school QWidgets-based Qt with QtDesigner (the RAD portion of QtCreator for pre-QtQuick) and QtQuick/QML with and without its RAD interface.

> I wish we had RAD environments like this for more languages (Racket, Python, etc. - even JS).

I've used the Python version of Qt with QWidgets in the past and it was a pretty nice workflow. I've never done it personally, but I know of people who use Python + QtQuick/QML and seem pretty happy with it. There's also various "app builder" tools for JS, but I don't know how good they are.

[MageSlayer]

As a Delphi/FPC/Lazarus veteran (10+ years), comparing one of the quickest compilers with Qt/Boost C++ development cycle looks like a joke. Much faster edit-compile cycle which scales without issues up 1e6+ LOC (yes, modules/incremental compilation done right right from the start)

[milcron]

The Python bindings to Qt don't require compilation. QML is an interpreted gui declaration, and Qt Quick allows programming behavior in Javascript.

[veeti]

PyQt is nasty GPLv3 or commercial license only. (And no, PySide is not an option: their last stable release is years old and for Qt 4.)

[MageSlayer]

You are not comparing apples to apples.

Try finding any native code static typing compiler with RAD on board featuring quick compilation within 2x C++ resulting binary speed.

[dkersten]

Not apples to apples, but its a pretty good tradeoff for C++ IMO: you get super high turnaround times because the bulk of the UI tweaking cycle is in QML or the RAD tools and you only need slow-compiling-C++ where native performance is required.

For me, while I like fast compile times as much as the next person, its not a deal breaker -- the workflow/environment and library features are. Ie can they easily deliver the required value to my customers. QML gives me a good middle ground between productivity & quick turnaround time, native integration and native performance. If you're unwilling to make that tradeoff, well... then you're limiting yourself to the tools that don't make that tradeoff (which may be perfectly fine, of course).

[bigtunacan]

It's not a good trade off for the end user. As it's not native you end up with a much slower running application with more memory overhead and bloat. Lazarus is compiled to small native applications that are easily installable for the user, fast, with both small memory and disk space usage.

I say this next piece as both a developer and an end user; developers of desktop applications are getting out of hand with how they treat these things. We are now to the point where a large segment of the developer population has so little regard for the end user that they believe bloatware Electron solutions are a good choice for "native" text based chat application.

[pjmlp]

Because QtCreator isn't up to the job compared even with Delphi 1 for Windows 3.x, but sadly the younger generations never got to use it professionally.

Delphi and Visual Basic, were like the Smalltalk/Lisp Machine (I am exaggerating a bit) of the RAD programming generation.

Try to create a database frontend or image manipulation program in QtCreator just with the GUI designer.

[dkersten]

The UI part of a database frontend is trivial and the code is very minimal in Qt (but there still code involved, for sure).

An image manipulation program, what does Delphi provide out of the box for this? I would assume that if you have anything non-trivial, you'd have some custom code to write? I mean, they can hardly have built-in components for every possible use case so I don't have to write any code. What am I missing here?

[pjmlp]

> I mean, they can hardly have built-in components for every possible use case so I don't have to write any code. What am I missing here?

The eco-system of companies selling components for every possible use case.

Most VB/Delphi shops would get early licenses from such companies. DevExpress is a surviving company from those days.

https://www.devexpress.com/Products/VCL/ (over 210 controls)

So you had a huge toolbox full with components for the majority of enterprise most common use cases.

As far as I am aware, there aren't any company selling components for Qt.

[dkersten]

There are, but they're few and far between and certainly not as diverse as what you've described.

[badsectoracula]

> Why "besides QtCreator, etc"? It sounds to me almost like "do you know any X besides all of the popular X". Is there any particular reason you discount QtCreator?

I know Lazarus (almost) inside out and i've tried several times to use QtCreator, mainly because C++ would allow me to reuse some of my C code. However i could never get used to how QtCreator expects from me to do more stuff, how unweildy the laying out widgets is (this is natural since Qt's layout management was made expecting programmers to do layouts via code but compared to Lazarus' alignment and anchor based layouts they feel like taking a step back - although the same can be told with Lazarus' layout if you try to do it via code) and other not necessarily big issues but still annoying enough for me to always drop it.

[jcelerier]

> Qt's layout management was made expecting programmers to do layouts via code

what ? no.

For widgets: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/designer-layouts.html

For QML: http://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/quick-screens.html

[badsectoracula]

You misunderstood, i meant that the programmers who designed Qt's layout systems expected the programmers who will use Qt would prefer to write code for laying out their UIs (most likely because this is what most UI libraries did and still do) so they designed the APIs with that in mind. I didn't mean that Qt required from them to do it via code.

This is in contrast to Lazarus' layout system, the programmers of which expected ("assumed", "thought", "believed", etc) that the programmers that will use Lazarus will create the UIs using the IDE's UI desiger and so made the layout system be more UI friendly as opposed to code-friendly.

[dkersten]

Have you tried QtQuick/QML? It sounds like its anchor/grid/constraints-based layouts work very similarly to Lazarus.

[vertex-four]

QtQuick, on the other hand, uses non-native widgets - the whole thing is rendered as an OpenGL scene.

[dkersten]

True. Some people may find that as a deal-breaker. Personally, with the age of web-UI's (that look very different from each other and certainly don't look like the native widgets), I don't see QtQuick's native-styled-but-non-native widgets a problem (and the OpenGL-based system has proven to be really great for performant animation).

But I can see that if you require platform-native widgets, QtQuick is probably not an option. I just think that most people don't need this ;-)

[vertex-four]

I'd argue that at this point, if you're building a desktop application, one of your goals is probably going to be the use of native widgets, which could be for e.g. accessibility concerns. Else you might as well build a web application.

[badsectoracula]

Isn't that a JSON-like language? I find describing UIs in text instead of "drawing" them like done in Lazarus to be going backwards.

Although TBH i haven't really looked into that. Most QtQuick programs i've seen look like something you'd see in a mobile phone or tablet instead of a normal desktop application, so i didn't had the incentive

[dkersten]

> Isn't that a JSON-like language?

It is (but its actually good!), but QtCreator also has a design tool to visually create QML-based UI's.

> I find describing UIs in text instead of "drawing" them like done in Lazarus to be going backwards.

This is a preference thing I guess - some people prefer visual design tools, some prefer text. I quite like QML's approach of giving me a simple declarative text description language and then providing me with a visual design tool to author it with if I prefer to do so.

> Most QtQuick programs i've seen look like something you'd see in a mobile phone or tablet instead of a normal desktop application

Early QtQuick was very much like this, but nowadays it has pretty good platform-style emulation (QtQuick Controls). How many applications use it, I don't know, especially nowadays that QtQuick has iOS and Android support. Also, since it gives you full styling freedom, I guess (for better or worse) many people make use of them rather than trying to look native. I've seen some very non-mobile style QtQuick applications too though, including desktop mail clients and such and they looked great.

[jcelerier]

You can do a lot of things graphically : http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/05/24/qt-quick-designer-qt-creat...

[chx]

There is https://blind.guru/qta11y.html as a problem with QT, I think it made to HN like three days ago.

[dkersten]

Whether or not that is a negative point for Qt depends on your perspective. I mean, Qt never claimed to have JAWS support and the guy is free to submit a patch. Its unfortunate, for sure, that Qt doesn't support popular accessibility tools, but that's hardly a problem unique to Qt or open source tools. This "If you want to support users with disabilities, you probably should not rely on hippie coders right now" is unfortunately true for most open source tools, but also for many commercial offerings. Does Lazarus/Delphi fare better with accessibility and JAWS support specifically?

Also from your link: "For now, you will need to write a native UI for every platform you want to support." -- is the Lazarus/Delphi story any better in this respect?

The discussion you mentioned is here, btw, and it seems to have mixed views: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14946358

[badsectoracula]

> Does Lazarus/Delphi fare better with accessibility and JAWS support specifically?

For this particular issue, yes, because Lazarus uses Win32 for Windows applications. For Linux it uses GTK2 (can also use Qt instead) which AFAIK has good accessibility support. For Mac OS X it uses Carbon (there is a Cocoa backend but it is still in prealpha) so... it depends on how accessible Carbon apps are i suppose.

I don't think there is any special support for accessibility however, it is all about what the underlying widgets provide out of the box.

[jcelerier]

Apparently GTK2 doesn't fare better with JAWS: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4136662/1495627

[badsectoracula]

That isn't relevant to Lazarus though since - from what i can tell from its site - JAWS is a Windows-only program and Lazarus uses the native Win32 controls under Windows. So it should work fine.

[rcarmo]

I want more tools. Qt is popular and I've tried it before, but it keeps cropping up as "the new RAD" in these discussions and I was (unsuccessfully) trying to steer the discussion away from it.

[lyrachord]

X rough, python no not-bad native widgets, Qt not well designed(@see blog don't use Qt, G)

[dkersten]

You're saying that Qt is not well designed because it's accessibility support does not include certain apis needed for the JAWS screen reader? That's a very narrow definition of "not well designed". I personally find Qt 5+ with QtQuick (not the older QWidgets) very well designed and I've looked into a large number of GUI frameworks over the years in a variety of languages.

[squarefoot]

"It's somewhat amusing to realize that in 2017 this is pretty much the easiest way to do a desktop app (besides RealBasic/Xojo which I've yet to try"

If you're interested in Basic programming then Gambas might interest you. Although not a clone of VB, it can be roughly considered being to VB what Lazarus is to Delphi: a 100% Open Source implementation. I would prefer Lazarus anyway, but it's indeed nice to see different alternatives to proprietary dev systems.

http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html

[anfractuosity]

I remember one BASIC, called RapidQ, which I really enjoyed playing with a long time ago (which was freeware, but unfortunately I think it stopped being maintained as the source was sold to another company).

It had a rather cool graphical interface to create GUIs, kind of like VisualBasic I think.

It even had APIs to interface with DirectX.

Pic of what the IDE looked like: http://basic.mindteq.com/Screenshots/RapidQ.jpg

[bigtunacan]

That project looks pretty cool actually. It is unfortunate that it is not cross platform.

[alex-e]

Speaking of the bloated slack client, there's a new native desktop app for Slack, Skype, and many others:

https://eul.im

It's only 4 MB and uses ~100 MB RAM.

[exikyut]

Wait, how are you doing Skype?

[nibblerres]

Kamelåse så fedt. Sykelkugle!

[wikibob]

Do you know who's behind the project?

[alex-e]

I am :)

Right now I'm working on setting up the company.

[throwaway7645]

As awesome as Lazarus appears to be here, Rebol is even more amazing in my opinion. There is no designer, but the GUI DSL is mind bending. Red is a Rebol inspired language that is also tiny with a compiler as well so you can build a nice cross-platform-native GUI and distribute it as a tiny executable (~1.5 MB). You can see the GUI stuff for both Rebol and Red. There's a YouTube video by Nick Antonnacio (spelling) that shows him building something like 40 GUI apps in an hour ranging from email apps to games like tic-tac-toe and snake...it was pretty crazy to see the first time.

I'm checking out Lazarus currently.

[hdhzy]

Do you mean this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=D50XULVZaYY ? Looks nice!

[throwaway7645]

That one and this one:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lR5Fzv6DP0I

That guy can build some simple apps FAST! It helps that Rebol has built-ins for everything.

[hdhzy]

Very cool, the examples that he builds are very similar to what I've built when I stated in Delphi (simple chats, word processors, music players) but to course Rebol is much more concise. I wish the controls would look more "native". Currently they look like Windows 3.11. Also... Downloading code over plain HTTP? Not good idea...

For people that are interested, here's a free book: http://www.lulu.com/shop/olivier-auverlot-and-peter-william-...

[throwaway7645]

The new language Red is 98% Rebol compatible and uses native GUI feel. If only it'll get finished and reach 1.0. Still a bit left on the roadmap.

[hdhzy]

Sounds good. Would you recommend learning Rebol and then Red or just forget about Rebol and start with Red? Not 1.0 means it's not production ready?

[thro1237]

Now, if it can spit out Android apps :-)