Would you support the development of a FPC GUI frontend?

[Robert Kosek]

As the topic title and poll question say, would you support the development of a graphical frontend to FPC? I am talking about financial support and not moral support. I ask because: a) I want a GUI frontend for FPC (Lazarus is its own FPC based compiler), and b) I cannot provide one for free. The reasons behind the second point are tangled at best, and best left alone at present.

I am willing to give it a shot, and if I fall short of the goal release all my source code as open source for the benefit of the community.

[noeska]

Sorry to disapoint you. I use delphi as an editor even for my fpc projects. And a i alread spend a lot of money on a delphi license i cannot afford to buy or support another ide with money. Although i am tempted if you make it an 25 euro shareware.

[Robert Kosek]

My probable price range would be $40, with a $20 to $30 upgrade price for a major version change. The goal would be affordability, stability, and (hopefully) good features.

I know you guys can't all pay a bunch of money. Neither can I. But I also can't afford to write one and give it away for free either.

[cronodragon]

Is it possible to create an FPC add-on for an already working IDE, something like Eclipse? That would make development cheaper. Just an idea.

[Robert Kosek]

For one thing I don't have Eclipse, don't know Java, and don't have the time it would take to learn Eclipse enough to add a plugin for FPC to it. Maybe someone else already has this knowhow, but not me. I can, however, make a mostly functional skeletal psuedo-IDE within about 90 days of work. (I'm being conservative because I haven't tried yet.)

Development cost isn't so much the issue as is supporting myself. I'll just have a different idea to do or something else to work on that can support me, comparatively, so I kind of have to make this slightly competitive -- even if I do it in my spare time. It's a problem of time that I could be making money in, putting myself at risk to develop a budget FPC faceplate.

[pstudio]

I chose option #3 because I'll have to see what it would be like before deciding if it's my money worth. I'm not sure what you would be making right now.

[Robert Kosek]

Completely fair. I'm not sure what, or if, I'm making either.

As of this moment it's just a hypothetical situation that I'm trying to evaluate. If I can do something like this and earn a bit of bread by it I'd be quite happy.

[JernejL]

FPC eclipse plugin? you guys gotta be insane, eclipse may be the most flexible IDE ever, but it is also definetly the biggest memory hog unstable ide you'll ever encounter.. what about a fpc delphi plugin?

[cronodragon]

FPC eclipse plugin? you guys gotta be insane, eclipse may be the most flexible IDE ever, but it is also definetly the biggest memory hog unstable ide you'll ever encounter.. what about a fpc delphi plugin?

I'm not an Eclipse fan neither. Installed 2 times, uninstalled 2 times, and it haven't touched my hard disk since then :lol:

I was just giving an example, aren't there any other "plug-in-able" IDE out there? :roll:

[Robert Kosek]

Well, there's Visual Studio. Chrome is a plugin language for VS that lets the compiler use Pascal as a language, but it's managed. I like Chrome for some things but not all things--the change is just too large for certain tasks.

Oh yes. If I do go ahead and give it a shot I'll be writing this in Lazarus. I only have D6 Educational and Turbo Delphi; I cannot sell with the first, and I cannot include custom components with the latter. Not to mention Turbo Delphi is seriously unstable. Maybe I could find a copy of D7 floating around on the 'net at some place like EBay...