Lightweight Pascal IDE for MacOS X

[savage]

Ingemar Ragnemalm has been working on Lightweight Pascal IDE for MacOS X...


It is an IDE for OSX 10.4 and Free Pascal, so
far only used with PPC (and it calls ppcppc, not fpc). It works fairly
well most of the time (don't be surprised if it crashes though), and
includes all features that I felt was vital, except a debugger
front-end. (Can't get everything into the first preliminary version.)

I made a simple web page about it, with a download of the current binary:
http://www.ragnemalm.se/LWP/

I guess I am looking for people who are not happy with Xcode or working
from the command-line. What do you say, could this mean anything to us?
What are the most important things to add/fix?

The screen shots look quite nice.

[WILL]

Well this is rather nice...

Where our Mac people at? :P

[Ingemar]

Ingemar here! I have made some more progress since the announcement, so there will be a new upload soon. There are many things left to do, the first uploaded version was just a first development version.

On MacOSX, I feel this can be important to Pascal developers. You have a few more options under Linux and Windows, like Dev-Pascal. Lazarus is being developed for MacOSX, though, but under X.

The biggest problem is to make a front-end to a debugger. Pascal-tuned debugging is not something you see in every development system.

[tux]

any plans for an intel release?

[savage]

[quote="Ingemar"]A new build is uploaded:

http://www.ragnemalm.se/LWP/

News:

- Can compile C units and ]

[Ingemar]

With over four years since the last posting, I'd like to update the thread a little bit.

"Lightweight Pascal IDE" is now "Lightweight IDE", not because it isn't Pascal but because it has become very good at dealing with other languages. In particular, it build C/C++/Objective C almost as well as FPC code, making those poor languages kind of bearable. It uses GDB for debugging, both FPC and C.

It comes as Universal binary, and builds them too. It supports Objective Pascal. It also supports GPC, CUDA, Ada and Java (ouch, awful language), plus Shellscripts and Makefiles as "backdoors". Last summer I published a short scientific paper about it and this spring a german textbook was released using it as teaching platform.

Mixing FPC and C is, since recently, fairly nice, although not automatic.

But there are a number of things that I havn't had time to do:

- Code completion
- Faster syntax highlighting by working locally
- Code folding
- Cocoa-based GUI (I am working on that though)
- Some GUI variants (planned once the Cocoa GUI is done)
- Cross-platform code. This is a big one. Linux and Windows would be vital for making it viable as an educational platform.
- GUI layout editing. (So far I have relied on Apple's tools but my own tool would give more freedom and be vital for cross-platform work.)

What about games? Well, a gaming framework is part of the project, and I have made a simple game (a Snake game) as example code. Games are important for me, I am not leaving them out.

[WILL]

Thanks for the update! :)

Don't forget to mention that the page URL has also been moved to: http://ragnemalm.se/lightweight/

I like your project. I feel that Mac needs more IDE alternatives than just Lazarus. Delphi is taking a long time, understandably, and Lazarus has been plagued with debugger issues, hopefully until this last release. Not as feature packed as the others, but every good project starts somewhere. Please do keep us informed as to your progress and I'll be sure to make news announcements as it is prudent to do so. :)

[Ingemar]

Thanks for the update! :)

Don't forget to mention that the page URL has also been moved to: http://ragnemalm.se/lightweight/

I like your project. I feel that Mac needs more IDE alternatives than just Lazarus. Delphi is taking a long time, understandably, and Lazarus has been plagued with debugger issues, hopefully until this last release. Not as feature packed as the others, but every good project starts somewhere. Please do keep us informed as to your progress and I'll be sure to make news announcements as it is prudent to do so. :)

Thank your, Will! This has taken a long time and I wish I had more time for it so I could beef it up with more advanced features and ports. OTOH, I am very happy with what I have and use it for everything. I realize that the name is against it, since "Lightweight" is too often taken as "trivial", but I insist that "Lightweight on your mind" is a nice motto.