[bytehowl]

There's one thing I don't understand.

Whenever TP or Delphi get brought up, people wax nostalgic about how amazing they were, and that they are actually unmatched to this day in certain aspects.

I know the adoption of both got hurt by Borland's and Embarcadero's corporate shenanigans. However, FreePascal and Lazarus are reportedly just as good as Borland's products, but without the business issues. Despite that, they seem to barely get used. Why?

[proaralyst]

I'd guess it's the same thing that makes any niche language difficult to use for real: developer education, tooling and lack of third party libraries. Mainstream languages tend to have these three things in spades, and the language itself is good enough.

[janc_]

FreePascal is pretty good but could be better with more manpower; Lazarus never was as good as Delphi GUI-wise, and hasn't been updated for modern GUI toolkits, so (unfortunately) it's almost obsolete by now.

[badsectoracula]

> Lazarus never was as good as Delphi GUI-wise

What do you mean? I've been using Lazarus for many years and i used Delphi 2 and 7 before that (mainly 2 though) and i find Lazarus to be an improvement over these versions (AFAIK Delphi 7 was incredibly popular - among Delphi developers anyway - to the point where it was offered for years after newer versions were made).

IMO the main reason is simply that Pascal has lost its "cool" status - and also there is a ton of misinformation out there about it (i even still see people mentioning Kernighan's article on Pascal about why it isn't good, which not only isn't valid anymore -aside from a couple of cosmetic differences- it also wasn't valid in the 90s or really even when he wrote it - though in his defense he was referring to Standard Pascal, but that hasn't been relevant for literal decades).

> and hasn't been updated for modern GUI toolkits, so (unfortunately) it's almost obsolete by now.

Lazarus is a fully volunteer-developed project, so people work on what they want. If you want support for a modern GUI toolkit you basically need to do it yourself (the maintainers are very accepting of external contributors).

Though chances are your info is a bit out of date. As of right now (i use the trunk version since i contribute to Lazarus, though my contributions are certainly on the "old GUI toolkits" side) there is support for Qt6 (which is modern enough in my book :-P) which seems to be at a decent state. Here[0] is an image with Lazarus compiled using the Qt6 backend with a small 3D model viewer i wrote - running Lazarus itself is a litmus test for a backend as the IDE is quite complex.

Of course the neat bit with Lazarus is that you can also use any other toolkit that is supported - in the same image you can see the same exact model viewer running with the Gtk1 backend :-P

[0] https://i.imgur.com/NE2LB3U.png