Quote Originally Posted by Robert Kosek
I pulled Lazarus out to give it a second, third or fourth (whichever), chance. I decided to remake an old project of mine that used SynEdit to edit the random map scripts from Age of Empires 2.

The resulting executable with just a SynAnySyn and a SynEdit, with no debug info and full optimization, was a 12.7mb bloated application. There isn't even a menu! This is 50% larger than Lazarus itself. :?
Lazarus does seem to generate bigger code especially with GUI kind of stuff. The minimal uncompressed size I could get in a project was 1.7 Mb.

However, I was able to compile some ugly old code in FPC/Lazarus and it miraculously worked. The IDE is vastly improved from what I've seen 2-3 years ago, as well as compilation time in FPC. I think FPC/Lazarus guys are doing better than those from CodeGear (guess, Delphi 2007 Trial crashed before, during and after installation). My only minor complaint is the overstrict syntax, but for the rest - I found compiled apps to be pretty stable.

Your problems might be related to SynEdit project improperly ported and I honestly didn't see any major improvements in it during last 4 years.