How would you advice setting up an Dev Enviroment?

[MuteClown]

So i don't really want to use Lazarus, seems too much that i don't need or would use on it. how would you suggest setting up an development environment for fpc to make it effective for maintaining? I want to start developing properly, instead of having a bunch of scraps and no order. I stopped programming for a while, now i want to come back and make sure i keep everything well organized so i can just get on with programming and developing.

[WILL]

What exactly did you want to develop for though? You haven't specified a development platform or intended target platforms. Object Pascal development isn't as simple as it used to be 10 or even 5 years ago. There are lots and lots of platforms and a fair selection of compilers/IDE. :)

Well I would have said the first thing you need is a good IDE, but without Lazarus, it'll cost you. Not that other open source IDE based on Free Pascal are bad, but they aren't of the caliber of Lazarus. Lazarus is the only free option for a compiler/IDE combo that'll get you started and working without much effort to setup and it's probably the best option for using Free Pascal.

That said to get a good development environment, it's going to cost you some money to purchase. It will also depend on what platforms and technologies you want to make the games or tools for.

You can go the Delphi route which will let you do Windows 32 and 64 bit now and cross-platform onto a Mac, however that will take a bit more setup and you'll need both a Windows machine and a Mac. Also to do the other non-32-bit platforms you'll need to purchase a copy of professional. So the cheapest Delphi option is to just make games for Windows 32-bit. If you did get the professional version of Delphi XE 2 then you could also export your code as a Free Pascal project to be compiled for iOS, but you'd need a Mac running Xcode and have FPC and FPC templates for Xcode installed on it.

There is the option of purchasing either Prism for .NET or Oxygene for Java from RemObjects. Both compiler/IDE suites are based off of Microsoft's Visual Studio Shell and have the same syntax, but require the use of managed or interpreted code. If you don't mind that then they are both viable options.

Prism will allow you to make games for any .NET or Mono supported platforms and also allow the use of the XNA SDK which has it's own active community and enables you to put your games on XBox 360 as well.

Oxygene for Java will allow the same, but for Java run-time engine supported platforms. You could also put your games on an Android moblie system if you used this as well. The other option for Android being FPC/Lazarus. Unfortunately I don't think that Oxygene for Java has been released yet, but it may still be in beta so you could probably get onto their testing team for it. I'm sure they'd love to have a game developer testing it out and making cool demos for them to show off.

Those are the big name options right now. There are other IDEs, a whole exhausting list of them (just check out past PGD News postings to get info on more of them) and they are also good, but the top 4 are and for a while will be: Lazarus (http://lazarus.freepascal.org/), Delphi (http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi), Prism (http://www.embarcadero.com/products/prism), Oxygene for Java (http://www.remobjects.com/oxygene/java.aspx).

[MuteClown]

Windows and want to start development for Linux as well, also haiku when it reaches a level of maturity. That is why i am going to go with FPC seems the better choice because of its cross platform ability. The reason i don't feel like going the Lazarus route is because i wouldn't be using the LCL, and i don't really like the editor. I was told a good way for keeping cross platform projects easy for maintaining, it to just use what ever text editor and use something like CMake. I have never used CMake but from my research i don't think it full works with Pascal, but you can write custom commands or something.

On the topic of IDE i am jealous of the Mac users, since they got two really nice lightweight IDEs which seem to be Mac only =/
I suppose Lazarus will have the best environment for debugging? Thats one thing i don't like doing on Emacs.

EDIT: Both 32 and 64 bit as well, so just as cross compile for win/linux so again for 32/64. I have two machine one with Windows other with linux, and want to have a best as i can environment which can be implemented on both and ill just update the directories.

[JSoftware]

You don't have to be using the LCL when using Lazarus. I use it to develop very non-visual firmware for ARM processors :)

Those days I can't live without Lazarus. There are just so many nice and nifty features packed into it, and I wouldn't hesitate to call it the best IDE I know. I guess you could use some old version of Delphi to write code in, and just compile from the command line

But if you just want a pretty good text editor, then I can recommend Programmers Notepad 2. I very often use it for minor edits

[User137]

Lazarus is very lightweight IDE in the end, at least compared to Delphi. What "too much" is there that you wouldn't use? It is designed to fit also in purpose of making just console applications. There is just the component palette, which you can almost completely hide by making the palette window just show other menus. You could possibly even compile Lazarus so that none of them are showing, because they are "installed components" like any custom ones.

It's possible to code pascal with just Notepad, but you would miss features like code completion, debugging, fpc compiler settings and so on.

Another thing that possibly makes Lazarus seem heavier than it is, is the splash screen. Start Lazarus with parameter:
lazarus.exe --no-splash-screen
... and you will see that Lazarus starts up in a fraction of second.