As strange as it may sound, I just wanted to *agree* with last flame of Almindor. Know that the issue "FPC/Lazarus create too big executables" was discussed thousand times on fpc and lazarus mailing lists, and
1. There are solutions -- as dmantione, Almindor (and google) pointed out.
2. At some point it's just considered "whining" when someone says that FPC/Lazarus are worse than Delphi just because they create too large executables. Let's face it: 2 MB filesize is not terribly bad. It's only bad when you have to transfer it over the network, but for this even simple non-FPC specific solutions (I mean compressing, with e.g. upx) are quite good.
I agree that it is an important knowledge to know how to make small exe size (so I'm not flaming everyone interested in this topic...). But it's not a *crucial thing*. When someone chooses one programming language over the other, or one proprietary-closed-source-Windows-only IDE over open-source portable IDE, and as a main reason gives that "the resulting exe size was too big" --- well, that's just not a good reason.
That's the main reason why I didn't wanted to get involved in this thread --- I just saw similar discussions between Delphi people and FPC people about "too big exe size" happen a lot. Well, I got involved now, basically just to back up Almindor post.
That's it. In summary, I just tried to explain why many FPC/Lazarus people find it very irritating when Delphi people ask over and over about "why executables are so large".
(Oh, and Lazarus has integrated debugger of course; under Windows this debugger is admittedly not so absolutely rock-solid stable as Delphi (under Linux things are better), but things are progressing nicely and it's definitely usable).
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