Lazarus: A Free Delphi for Linux!

Those were the days of rampant piracy, of using Turbo Pascal 2.1 to Delphi to Borland C++ Builder, for our programming projects. Later my heart jumped for joy when Kylix was introduced for Linux but that was a shortlived affair! The Kylix project died but the open source project Lazarus woke up Pascal from the dead and delivered a slick high quality sophisticated emulation of Delphi for Linux!

Lazarus is sure to bring smiles to delphi developers. It gives a graphical IDE for the Free Pascal Compiler. The output is a Linux executable in native (not interpreted) code!

Here is a snapshot. You must run lazarus ide from the graphical Applications menu not from the terminal or console.

When it opens, 4 windows are active: Lazarus Ide, source editor,Form1, object inspector and messages. Lazarus faithfully follows the delphi look and feel and we wonder if Borland or its successor approves of the copying.

We have done our PhD computing projects using a pirated copy of Delphi. Now I am not embarassed to use a clean copy in Linux. More power to the Lazarus developers and we hope to start writing more articles on Lazarus.

The version of Lazarus installed is 0.9.28, while the FPC compiler is at version 2.4.0. Don't laugh at the FPC compiler, it is one of the best compilers for creating ultra fast Linux binaries!

We will restart our Pascal love in the near future. Stay tuned for small projects using Lazarus.