> I don't see a great point in using Lazarus for Windows-only
> projects, at least for those that already did projects with
> Delphi. At least for former Delphi users, portability is the
> main reason for using Lazarus so this should be the primary
> goal, even when thinking about Delphi compatibility.
>
> -Michael
>
In my case this is *NOT* true; and I suspect it's not true for many Windows
users of Lazarus. In my previous company I used Delphi versions 3, 5 and 7.
Beyond version 7 there were too many compatibility issues with existing
code, and the price became too high.
Now that I'm self employed I have moved over to Lazarus/Free Pascal. This is
partly because of the cost but mainly because I'm comfortable with the IDE,
form designer and compiler. In many ways it is similar to the older versions
of Delphi; this is NOT meant as a criticism.
Looking at the download statistics at SourceForge it seems that over 70% of
this year's downloads have been for Windows. Now, it may be that people are
using Windows to cross compile for Linux; but I doubt that it is very
common.
The customers I write software for are exclusively Windows based. For me it
might seem that having Lazarus cross-platform is a hindrance since the
developers are continuously having to deal with OS
differences/incompatibilities. In practice it probably makes Lazarus a
better product since more care has to take place during design.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of programmers using Lazarus
are developing cross platform software. Unfortunately I suspect that answers
obtained via this list would be skewed towards multi-platform.
Malcolm
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