Porting to Lazarus: Why Delphi Win32 is important

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Why Delphi Win32 is important

Delphi Win32 is important because of Linux.

Right now it is one of the best options for cross-platform development. Kylix is dead (correct me if I am wrong); Lazarus is not ready yet (but it's on the way); Mono is not good enough yet (and is doomed to play catch with Microsoft .NET). Other portable options (Java/GTK/QT/etc) don't have a nice RAD environment like Delphi.

On the other hand, WINE has evolved (in the last years) enough to run most Win32 applications written in Delphi 7 or less. If the developer avoids certain problematic components, it runs 100% fine. Faster than Java, more complete than Mono, easier to code than GTK / QT / whatever. Been there, done that.

Many software solutions these days are web applications - cross-platform by design. For the few cases where you can't run in a browser, a Delphi Win32 application running under Wine is an excellent solution. This way you can please both markets easily.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: Hey,
Know what .Thats an Important point you are making. May I suggest that you look up Netbeans(free) and jdeveloper (free) , Jbuilder , and IntelliJ . The later are commercial. They are awesome IDEAs and in someways better in features.

Thanks
http://wwww.rekonsult.com; Fri Apr 27, 12:34:00 AM 2007
Anonymous said...: 23/11/2008: Lazarus is doing great now. Give a try to its SVN version.; Sun Nov 23, 09:31:00 AM 2008