Lazarus 0.9.20 Just Released

[WILL]

It seems that the Lazarus team is making good time as their latest update to their vastly improving IDE suite has come only a few months since the last one. Lazarus 0.9.20 was released just last week.

Heavy work has been done on the LCL, the debugger and widgets, including the new widgetset called fpgui and some updating and fixes to Qt.


Language translations for German, Finnish, Catalan, Russian,
Italian, Africaans (af-za) and Spanish where updated.


Another big IDE fix: "renaming a component now automatically renames methods with default names, and inherited components"


Some stuff on the debugger:

- added dwarfloading to windebugger
- added exception dissection
- added linenumber address resolving
- added setting of breakpoints



I should also note for all you Windows Vista fans that the Win64 branch of Lazarus is now offered in daily snapshots over here: http://michael-ep3.physik.uni-halle.de/Lazarus/


Get more information about the Lazarus project or read the details of the lastest release at: Lazarus.FreePascal.org (http://lazarus.freepascal.org/)!

[JernejL]

This is nice project, i even submitted my first patches to it last week, so, the ide now has multiline component palette, and i'm going to make object inspector look better as well :P

[WILL]

Hey, nice! I've not updated yet, but I found that maximizing the main IDE forum to be annoying. nice to see the details are finally being taken care of.

Oh and hey.. if you can fix this nasty bug, you rock. When you delete a group from inside a group... it crashes. Every time it does it without fail. :P

[JernejL]

Hey, nice! I've not updated yet, but I found that maximizing the main IDE forum to be annoying. nice to see the details are finally being taken care of.

Oh and hey.. if you can fix this nasty bug, you rock. When you delete a group from inside a group... it crashes. Every time it does it without fail. :P

i haven't looked into minimize and restore routines yet (and dumb taskbar buttons), but will in future, right now i need to construct a widgetset independant combobox that can have any variable height for the object inspector.. oh and i added minimum main form constraints size. but this is going to come out in next release (or maybe it is in trunk already)

about group bug: what do you mean exactly? is there a mantis ticket for it?

[marmin]

Unfortunately, it grows bigger and bigger with components and features, and one notices this in performance. Compilation is , compared to Delphi, slow, and there are some really strange behavioures on Windows. The build-up of windows is slow.. of course one could say with a fast CPU or card no one notices, just like one could say big execs don't matter with a big hard drive. . it's debatable.

I remembered the lazarus build 0.9.8 was really nice, compact, it was quite good responsive compared to Delphi. It was a bit sluggish but that was OK for a free program. That's why I switched. But now.. If I fire up Delphi 6 personal , it's just like a new , fast, world opens up, so I recently went back again.

[jdarling]

I have to agree with all points, the latest version is a great improvement. I've been running it for a few days now, and except for adding images to a TImageList it runs great (if I try and add images it crashes, still have to run the debugger to find out why).

On the other side, re-building the IDE every time you add a component really sucks. The re-build cycle is extremely slow, and if you have a few dozen component packs to install your going to be there a while. Would be nice if you could do an "Export" of your component settings, install new version, "Import" the settings and do one single build.

[savage]

I have to agree with all points, the latest version is a great improvement. I've been running it for a few days now, and except for adding images to a TImageList it runs great (if I try and add images it crashes, still have to run the debugger to find out why).

On the other side, re-building the IDE every time you add a component really sucks. The re-build cycle is extremely slow, and if you have a few dozen component packs to install your going to be there a while. Would be nice if you could do an "Export" of your component settings, install new version, "Import" the settings and do one single build.

The sooner they add the ability to add components dynamically, a la Delphi, via some sort of bpl or similar the easier it will be for all concerned.

[JernejL]

The sooner they add the ability to add components dynamically, a la Delphi, via some sort of bpl or similar the easier it will be for all concerned.

in about 6 months or so when next big release of FPC comes out (new wintendo linker comes with that) things should go a lot faster then.

still, there is no delphi or lazarus or anything else that could beat D4 in compiling time and ide functionality.

[Legolas]

Of course Lazarus needs some work here and there, eg. a better package handling (I'm badly waiting for that) or some improvements in the interface, but... Hey! I love this RAD! With Lazarus I have ported an application from win32 to PocketPC simply by recompiling it :D

[marcov]

Unfortunately, it grows bigger and bigger with components
and features, and one notices this in performance.


The lower speed has to do with the external ]
The build-up of windows is slow.. of course one could say with a fast CPU or card no one notices, just like one could say big execs don't matter with a big hard drive. . it's debatable.
[/quote]

Big exe's don't matter as much as speed. But except for the IDE's compilationspeed (which is limited by the external linker more than anything else), I don't see a speed problem with Lazarus. For large projects it's faster than D7.

I still run Lazarus on a P233.

[JernejL]

the new fpc release in few months will have internal linker and will make these speed troubles (and shitload of temp files) a thing of past ;) oh and did i mention that the linker is responsible for too big exe sizes? they use some gnu linker, which has a bug and "forgets" to strip some debug sections.

[WILL]

Hey marcov! Thanks for the heads-up on the linker.

The GNU linkers appear to be the bane of not only a few small, but many issues with FPC. The FPC team is doing great work in providing their own solution. :thumbup:

So in a few months huh? Any pedictions to the actual release date? ;)

I'm sure that FPC 2.2 will be as big an event as the 2.0 release was and Lazarus 1.0 will be.

[JernejL]

So in a few months huh? Any pedictions to the actual release date? ;)

the answer i got few days ago from almindor was few months after new year, i can ask him about specific on irc..