Comment by pkphilip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkphilip | Hacker News Reader

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I would argue that Lazarus is a lot better than Go + QT on many counts - including the fact that it is completely free and you don't have to get an expensive QT developer license.

Think Visual Basic but cross-platform, with a much better language and component architecture.

You can develop non-trivial apps in hours rather than days.

The IDE is here: www.lazarus-ide.org

Why Lazarus?

* Has a proper Rapid Application Development (RAD) IDE with visual layout, event handlers, component tool bars etc and also built in documentation

* Extremely fast to develop on: The IDE starts in a couple of seconds. Compilation to native binaries in seconds.

* Cross Platform - Windows, Linux, Mac OS and perhaps even Android

* Binaries are really fast

* Excellent set of visual components

* Excellent set of database components including grids, CRUD toolbars etc

* You can write your own components very easily.

* Very small executable

* Most Delphi documentation is directly usable

* Many existing products use Lazarus https://wiki.freepascal.org/Projects_using_Lazarus

* Demos and projects here: https://www.getlazarus.org/

Lazarus is fine and good, but what does it have to do with writing UIs for Go apps? Can you integrate Delphi/Lazarus code together with Golang code in some meaningful way?

Yes? It supports different calling conventions. Easiest would be exporting things cdecl from Go. But usually the better way to do this is to write the UI in FreePascal (or something else) and use some form of IPC like pipes or network sockets to get the data to the UI.

I've actually done this, it works well, and the Lazarus GUI libraries manage to get a natural look and feel on all platforms.

https://github.com/ying32/govcl/blob/master/README.en-US.md

That's great. If someone has spent the effort to do that it is worth using.

This is definitely more what I had in mind, awesome!

Wow! this is good! I didn't even know such a thing existed.

Are you the person who wrote this? if so would like to contribute in some way.

I'm not the one who wrote it, i found it while looking for Nim bindings for Lazarus' LCL.

Wow this looks really interesting.. however it seems kinda risky to start developing a commercial app when the whole documentation is in chinese.. :)

> Think Visual Basic [...]

I tried it a few years ago and ran away for this exact reason : I have VB PTSD from some complex Excel apps that I inherited at work ;)

But yeah if I was objective I could see a lot of value in Lazarus.

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