Objective comparison between FreePascal/Lazarus and Delphi

[JSoftware]

The Laz team could use more structuring I think.

I think what it needs is more contributors

[arthurprs]

Debuger is miles away.

[WILL]

I think what it needs is more contributors

That kind of falls into the 'too many cooks spoil the soup' scenario. More coders doesn't make a better project nessissarily. Yes the project could benefit from more people to tackle the LCL problem (huge workload, not enough coders to do it all), but there are other problems that plague the project that have nothing to do with the amount of coders contributing to it.

The biggest issue is that the original project leader seemingly bailed and others have been juggling the project as best they can. Kudos to them, but I've not seen much of an organizational structure published on the Lazarus site nor have I seen some kind of 'creative roadmap' other than a list of incomplete features yet to be completed. That doesn't mean that there isn't an organized core team, but publicly there isn't much of a presence which doesn't help to invite those seeking help or wanting to contribute. Mantis alone doesn't make a very good PR campaign to bring in more coders unfortunately.

It's not an easy project to run and manage. It has huge goals (some we've seen completed mostly!) and requires a lot of man-power to complete them. Hell I have a hard enough time trying to get help on this site, so I understand. It's just realistically the project lacks in PR management. If they could solve that then a lot of things like documentation and public interest will sort themselves out in the course of time.

[JSoftware]

That kind of falls into the 'too many cooks spoil the soup' scenario. More coders doesn't make a better project nessissarily. Yes the project could benefit from more people to tackle the LCL problem (huge workload, not enough coders to do it all), but there are other problems that plague the project that have nothing to do with the amount of coders contributing to it.

I don't agree. And as far as I understood noone called you lazy, or insinuated that. But I think that would be starting to stride from the objectivity topic of the topic at hand.

It's not incredible goals the project is trying to achieve. It just seems to me that some people put the wrong expectations on the program(lazarus). Working with GDB isn't exactly magic, but it varies alot from each platform apparently, so I don't know why it's only Martin and Marc working on it. There's a standard, but GDB implementors don't even follow it themselves. I think I'll try abstracting it in the future because I need remote debugging to debug AVR32's

"Good opensource software is created out of necessity; not necessarily altruism" - I think Marco Van Der Voort said something like that once

As far as I've understood it's the only same guy who's been working on the official documentation for the last 10 years. Without getting paid of course

"In opensource projects there aren't any lack of people telling others which direction to take; only lack of people willing to implement those changes" - Some other dude from one of the epic the Embacadero threads on Lazarus