I'd like to point out that the main reason for using Lazarus is for ease
of use when programming, keeping track of source files and the like.
Unfortunately, Lazarus is not very user friendly to screen reader users,
and (as far as I know), it never has been.
That eliminates a small but significant number of users right out of the
gate.
Another problem is the fact that these days, nearly everything is
pushing online, connected systems, and this kind of app is a nontrivial
exercise on FPC. I struggle with this every time I want to make an
application that talks to other servers, because (as mentioned above) I
can't use lazarus, and there are precious few examples of this kind of
thing that comes with the FPC install. There are a few examples of
tcp/ip code, but they are overly simplistic, and don't really show the
whole server/client dynamic most folks are looking for these days.
I'd wager that's a large part of the reason why fpc isn't getting more
use. Even those of us that want to use it for development struggle to
do relatively simple things if we're not using lazarus for our
development environment.
Sometimes, folks just want to integrate their pascal development into
their current tool chain, and there's nothing wrong with that, but not
using lazarus knocks off a large portion of the capabilities that can be
showcased when someone new starts using fpc for their development. We
really need more sample/example code showing how things are done w/o
lazarus to pick up the slack. I think that more than anything else
would go a long way to helping adopters stick with fpc as a development
environment.
Also, I see very few (if any) examples of how to generate GUI apps when
using fpc commandline compiling, (again, without lazarus in the mix).
This also makes for complications. I almost always have to use
powerbasic on windows, and java on other platforms if I want a decent
gui, since there are very few tools for generating Graphical interfaces
if you're not using the default development environment, (fpc is not the
only culprit on this one).
With java it's easy, I just use the grid layout, and poof, it's all
handled for me, I don't have to worry about where to put things on the
screen.
I don't know how to mix java with pascal, like I do with C, I can
generally generate the gui with java, then use another language for the
backend items. I have no idea how this can be done using fpc.
Generally though, I avoid gui entirely on platforms other than windows,
since powerbasic makes gui generation simple, just by creating elements,
and placing them anywhere I like. I know this can be done on fpc, but
again, zero examples are included with the distribution, and any
searches I've done all turn up lazarus code for doing these kinds of
things, which is not ideal.
That's my take on it all, from a different perspective, Feel free to
use/ignore as is your want.
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