Lazarus 2.0 RC3 – Delphi-compatible cross-platform IDE
I was eyeing Lazarus, because it is close to my particular crossplatform toolkit ideal. I think that UI toolkit should use native widgets and near zero cost FFI. So any toolkit that draws for itself is not within my ideal. The most problematic platform for my ideal is Android as the toolkit should run without NDK. C++ does not cut it. Java would work for Android, but on other platforms there&#x27;s FFI.<p>FreePascal does compile to Java bytecode. It is an experimental feature as far as know, but it&#x27;s promising.<p>There is lots to like about FreePascal, even if I dislike the syntax a bit. See the Modern Object Pascal Introduction¹ for reference. But memory handling is something that does not fit my vision. I would hope for something similar to Swift - automatic reference counting. I like that the compiler is not LLVM or GCC based. With ARC I can forgive even the manual UUIDs for components.<p>That&#x27;s how I saw it from quite a big height so excuse me if I&#x27;m misguided.<p>At the moment Swift looks promising for me without possible transpilation to Kotlin as seen in one project ². Or D, as it should be easier to fit Java. But I have my eye on Lazarus. It certainly is much more mature a project.<p>¹ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;castle-engine.io&#x2F;modern_pascal_introduction.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;castle-engine.io&#x2F;modern_pascal_introduction.html</a><p>² <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;angelolloqui&#x2F;SwiftKotlin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;angelolloqui&#x2F;SwiftKotlin</a>