Free Pascal compiler now supports dynamic packages

135 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by sysrpl
(getlazarus.org)

29 Comments

sysrpl

11 hours ago

I am pleased to announce the first release of full dynamic package support for the Free Pascal Compiler and the Lazarus IDE. This feature has been a long time coming for the FPC ecosystem and has taken more than 20 years to realize through the work of many FOSS individuals.

Dynamic packages allow programmers to create and install components, controls, and Lazarus extensions in seconds without rebuilding the entire Lazarus IDE. They can also be used in by Free Pascal programmers to develop and deploy plugins that expose native Pascal classes and types through dynamic package libraries. To support this functionality, I have made numerous improvements to the compiler, its runtime, and the Lazarus IDE. I have also created additional IDE extensions to improve the experience of working with Lazarus packages. Read more at the link above.

phba

9 hours ago

Awesome work. It's great to have a FOSS alternative while (Embarcadero) Delphi gets worse with every new release.

andsoitis

10 hours ago

Congratulations!

Pascal/Lazarus/Delphi strike such a nice balance of responsiveness in the development lifecycle.

sysrpl

10 hours ago

Thank you. This has been a long time coming, perhaps 20 years in the making. I realize people are moving on to newer languages and frameworks, but there is just something special about older versions of Delphi and now Lazarus that makes it so much easier to write desktop software than most other frameworks. You can just drop components on a form designer, press run, and in a second's time you have a program. Of course there is more to it than that, but with dynamic package support, users can make or use components even faster as they no longer need to rebuild the IDE to install or uninstall native code.

switchbak

5 hours ago

I was doing exactly that some 27 years ago for my first internship. It has been a disappointment ever since seeing how little many other environments have prioritized tight feedback loops. Outside of dynamic stuff, mainly.

pjmlp

10 hours ago

Congratulations on the achievement, and to everyone that made it happen.

Similar to Delphi packages I assume.

ethin

3 hours ago

I would love to use Lazarus, but the UI toolkit it uses has some very bad accessibility bugs that make it practically unusable with my screen reader. FreePascal's love of syntax diagrams is also a turn-off for me (I've always preferred things like EBNF or similar for grammar notation).

kristianp

9 hours ago

This seems to be a fork of Lazarus. The official Lazarus is at https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

sysrpl

9 hours ago

I have been running the website getlazarus.org for 13 years to support add features to both FPC and Lazarus that jump ahead of the normal releases. We have been working of dynamic packages for a long time, and there will be a period between now, and when it is sent as a MR back into the mainline. When enough time has passed and feedback given these features are typically rolled into the main release, and at getlazarus I move on towards developing the next features.

sigzero

9 hours ago

Good to know and thanks for your explanation and all the work you do.

Perenti

4 hours ago

I love Free Pascal. I've tried using claude/codex/qwen to write in it, but all the models seem to love writing uncompileable code, and ending up in fearsome knots over it.

It's my number one "knock something together that just works" language for humans though.

publlus_enigma

4 hours ago

Well done to the entire team behind this!

I haven't programmed Pascal since the 90s, but I always appreciated the design philosophy and tools like Turbo Pascal for rapid development.

I find myself becoming increasingly disillusioned by many modern/popular languages, development methodologies and frameworks (particularly around interpreted languages lime JavaScript and Python), so I will check this out!

sizzzzlerz

5 hours ago

Is Pascal used much these days. I learned it way back in the 80s since several of my MSEE classes used it. Professionally, I never used nor heard of it being used except for Apple. I'm sure it has evolved since the dark ages to incorprorate more modern programming techniques but with the wide range of languages available today and the fact that it is rarely taught anymore, why might some decide to use it on their project?

veqq

5 hours ago

I've shipped a few things to clients with it in the past 5 years.

Perenti

4 hours ago

The FLStudio DAW suite is written in Delphi.

rurban

2 hours ago

Anthony: Whats "dynamioc library support"? Is that a typo in the commit message?

yonisto

33 minutes ago

Congratulations! This is a great achievement.

How do you handle base address assignment on windows?

HexDecOctBin

9 hours ago

Last time I tried Lazarus, the strangest feature that FPC was missing when compared to Delphi was being able to declare variables anywhere (as opposed to only at the top of a block). FPC is still stuck in a very C89 model of declarations for some reason, perhaps that's just what happens when ecosystems stagnate.

sysrpl

9 hours ago

That feature you mentioned was added by the Delphi team in support of closures. They way they developed it was jankey IMO, as it creates an interface behind the scenes and populate with information about the local stack.

Though I do very much appreciate C#, with its lambda functions, expression trees, and especially the tooling, Free Pascal and Lazarus exist as a happy compromise between those things and native code integration, where working with C libraries like libcairo, libxml2, libssl, libsdl, and opengl are much easier and a pleasure to work with when using Free Pascal, and conversely are more difficult to wrangle when using C# or Java.

wk_end

6 hours ago

All OP is asking for is the ability to declare variables at first use instead of at the top of a function. You don't need closures or anything that'd inhibit C compatibility for this - C itself has supported this since C99. It's fairly simple if you're willing to give up single-pass compilation, which (I think?) FPC already has.

trashface

3 hours ago

Could probably just get the source and have an LLM vibe code that, for personal use seems fine.