Lazarus libraries free pascal free download. Lazarus The Lazarus IDE is a stable and feature rich visual programming environment for the FreePascal Compi. Lazarus is a free cross-platform visual integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development (RAD) using the Free Pascal compiler. Its goal is to provide an easy-to-use development environment for programmers developing with the Object Pascal language, which is.
In my search for Xojo alternatives I was pointed to Lazarus https://www.lazarus-ide.org which is a cross-platform IDE that uses a Delphi-compatible language (i.e. object Pascal). I was pretty happy to see that it has a Mac version of the IDE and I will freely admit that I prefer to work on MacOS for a variety of reasons. Among them is usually ease of installation and Lazarus completely fails on this count in my opinion.
Let’s start with installation. The Lazarus website takes you to a SourceForge repository that has three downloads. fpc is the compiler, command line tools and non-visual components. fpcsrc is the sources of fpc and its packages and you need that for code browsing. And then finally there is the lazarus IDE itself with visual components and help files.
First issue is that none of the Package files are code signed which means you automatically have to work around Apple’s security. Not hard but still it doesn’t give you warm fuzzies right off the bat. I forget which step made me do this but I had to upgrade to the latest version of Xcode and install the Xcode command line tools.
Then there was the issue that the Lazarus downloads doesn’t included a Mac version that will run on newer Mac systems. So you end up going to the Free Pascal Compiler repo on SourceForge to get it to install.
Finally, you get to the point where the Lazarus IDE installs and then you get to the configuration screen. As you can the FPC sources can’t be found. But wait, wasn’t that part of the big three downloads I did to begin with?
Pascal Lazarus App Download
In the long run no amount of reinstalling or internet searching could solve this problem. There does happen to be an entry in the ComboBox at /usr/local/share/fpcsrc and when you use that option a dialog warning you “Without the proper FPC source code browsing and completion will be very limited.” But it lets you ignore it and actually open the IDE. For now we’ll ignore that the debugger doesn’t appear to exist either.
A blank project appears including a blank form (Form1). The component library window is spread across the top of the window with 15 tabs to break it up. In the Standard tab double click on the TLabel adds it to the form. From there you can drag the control to the location of your choice.
Things go very downhill from here. The label is selected and the eight handles appear and the mouse cursor changes when hovering over them. One would think that you can simply grab the handle to resize the control. Alas, I could not with the label even though I could with the other controls. I couldn’t even change its width from the properties list.
The properties list is pretty standard. All of the properties are listed in alphabetical order which I can live with but I definitely appreciate the grouping that Xojo does (although I still prefer the older Real Studio properties list to the Xojo Inspector). Logical groupings make life easier in a properties list.
A tab control on the properties list also shows the available events for the control. If you click on the right side of the event I immediately get an error “Error: include file not found ‘typshrdh.inc'”. Um…sure. Anyway, at this point I can’t do much more without getting these setup properly.
After spending a couple of hours over the course of three days I’ve given up. My Google-Foo is pretty strong but I keep getting nowhere. The directions I’ve found are pretty minimal and I’ve done what they say I should be doing to no avail.
All of this tells me several things. The lack of documentation, particularly for MacOS, tells me that that it’s not well maintained for MacOS and I don’t think it’s used by Mac developers very much. And this is long before I get into evaluating the language and libraries that are available for it.
For ease of installation and getting that first Hello World application up and running Xojo is by far the clear winner. Look, I don’t expect an open-source project to be as easy to setup as a commercial tool so perhaps it’s not a fair evaluation. But it is one of my criteria because I have clients that take over development of their projects after we do the initial work. So if I’m having these types of problems I can’t imagine a less skilled developer having any less.
If you’re using Lazarus on the Mac I’d love here from you. Drop me a line at support@bkeeney.com and perhaps we can get me past this hurdle so I can do a real evaluation of the tool.
│English (en) │
This article applies to Mac OS Classic only.
See also: Multiplatform Programming Guide
MacOS is the target for Mac OS Classic, i.e. the predecessor to macOS. macOS itself was previously marketed as Mac OS X and OS X. For macOS, see Target Darwin.
- 2Some tips
- 5Cross compiling from Mac OS X to Mac OS
Compiling in MPW
Free Pascal can now be used in the MPW development environment.
Free Pascal for MPW call assembler and linker via ToolServer. This means that you need ToolServer installed. This will normally not be an issue, since ToolServer is included in the MPW distribution.
In rare instances, you might get the error message 'Can't call the assembler, switching to external assembler.' I do not know the origin of this, but it will help to restart. On Mac OS X you might need to restart even OSX. It might also indicate that you need to increase the memory setting for ToolServer.
Another workaround for such problems is to let the compiler write out an MPW script (option -s). This will assemble and link when executed in MPW. This method can also be used if the compiler is to be called from a third program, to overcome the deadlock situation mentioned below under Dos.Exec.
For crosscompiling e.g. from macOS to Mac OS Classic, see below.
Some tips
Choosing apptype
For casual users, copying Pascal text only programs from a book, {$APPTYPE CONSOLE} is appropriate.
If you want an MPW tool, use {$APPTYPE TOOL}.
For maximum portability, the following:
... ensures it will be an MPW tool on Mac OS, and a console application in Delphi where {$APPTYPE TOOL} is not recognized.
Resources
Since 24-01-2004 mac style resources can be included with {$R <resfile>}. If the resource file ends with .r it is considered a Rez type resource file (in text form). For all other files (including .rsrc), binary resources are assumed. Several resource files can be included.
Error messages
Errors, warnings, hints and other messages written by the compiler are in MPW format - that is you can execute them and the error location will be displayed.
Dos.Exec
The procedure Dos.Exec is used to execute other programs. In MacOS this is supported, and the program(s?) which can be executed is MPW tools. An AppleEvent is sent to ToolServer which in turn executes the tool. A limitation is that ToolServer is not reentrant, so if a program which is called via Dos.Exec, in turn call Dos.Exec, it will be deadlocked.
Assembler symbols
Internal symbols in the generated assembler files will have a lowercase 's' as part separator instead of '$'. The reason is that PPCAsm does not support $.
QuickDraw globals
There is a variable qd defined in System.pp for use as the QuickDraw global.
For {$APPTYE TOOL} and {$APPTYPE CONSOLE} it is initialized, but for {$APPTYPE GUI} you have to initialize it yourself.
Debugging
See MPW debugging
Global variables
Currently all global variables are indirect, i.e. the entry in the TOC is always a pointer to data. (In the future small data items may be stored directly in the TOC)
Thus all references to globals are via a construct like: lwz rX, yyy[TC](r2) ;loads a pointer to a global into rX
Cross compiling from Mac OS X to Mac OS
Although not necessary nowadays when there exists a native compiler for target MacOS, here is some info on how to cross compile. See also Link on target.
Crosscompiling step on macOS
When compiling, add these options:
If make is used, add OPT=-st OS_TARGET=macos
Note that one must first build the RTL by issuing make in rtl/macos, with the above options, to be able to build other programs. The RTL must then be assembled and linked (see below) before compiling any program, otherwise the search paths in the link script will not be correct.
You might also want to add option -a, then the link script will not delete unneeded files, in particular the assembler files (*.s). This can be useful if there are problems with the link scripts and you want to rerun it.
Assembling and linking step on Mac OS Classic
In case that host and target machine is different, transfer the produced files (assembler files (*.s) and link script *_ppas) to the host.
In Mac OS Classic, use MPW to assemble and link the output from FreePascal by executing the link script (which is an MPW script), with its directory as current directory. Unfortunately the link script does not(?) obtain the proper mac file type, so this has to be fixed first e.g. with the MPW command SetFile.
Example: To build Hello World (together with the rtl unit system.pp), execute:
Above circa 2004/5.
Working notes: situation as of late 2012
The objective here is to build PPC and possibly 68K compilers, first as cross-compilers to run on a PC and then to run natively on Mac OS 9. Part of the incentive for this is to investigate whether a PPC Mac, e.g. my (MarkMLl) G3 beige with 'Old World' ROMs, is a usable testbed for the fixed 68K compiler which Sven has added to trunk at around 2.8.
On e.g. Debian Linux, build and install cross-binutils:
Do the same for m68k-linux-gnu.
Build a cross-compiler to run on a PC but targeting PPC:
Renaming the compiler prevents it from being deleted by make clean etc., consider extending that OPT setting with -dEXTDEBUG.
Build a native RTL and compiler:
Lazarus Pascal For Mac Download
Bringing macos/sysdir.inc up to date shows that the amiga, embedded, watcom and symbian OS targets are similarly falling behind. It's instructive to compare the amiga target (which has not been updated) with the morphos target (which has).
There's also a problem inside the compiler itself where entries of type AT_NONE are being generated but not handled.
To be continued.