Lazarus is a cross platform visual IDE which provides a Delphi clone for Pascal and Object Pascal developers. It is developed for and supported by the Free Pascal compiler, and as of March 2008 available for several Linux distributions, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.

Distributed under a mix of free software licenses, Lazarus is free software, just as Free Pascal is. Notably among those licenses is a modified version of the GNU Lesser General Public License. The modification grants extra permissions to allow Lazarus to be used in proprietary software.

Free Pascal is a compiler which runs on many operating systems. It is designed to use and compile Delphi source code, which is Object Oriented Pascal. Unlike Java which is intended to be write once, run anywhere, Lazarus and Free Pascal aim to be write once, compile anywhere. As the same compiler is available for all of the above operating systems, there is no need for recoding to produce identical products for different platforms, except when operating-system-dependent features are used. Cross-compiling is supported.

Under Microsoft Windows Lazarus is less stable and less well-documented than Delphi, but has multi-platform capability and is more transparent, customizable and can run from a USB flash drive. Under Linux, Delphi source code can be compiled with Lazarus with a little adaptation. Lazarus source code can be adapted to compile under Delphi and Kylix (An abandoned version of Delphi for Linux).


See also: Delphi, Delphi Prism, Free Pascal


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