Lazarus is a good attempt to mimic Delphi, but it suffers from GUI jank. It uses the GTK GUI library, which in my experience is hard to get good performance out of. For example, when dragging things around it hitches and lags, instead of a smooth drag action. Another thing is the toolbar buttons are far too small for 2025. Maybe there's an option somewhere, but I couldn't find it. I also noticed that Lazarus has more buttons and options on-screen than Delphi did. This could be seen as "features" but it's also "clutter". And the extra features on-screen are not that useful, at least to me as someone who used Delphi a long time ago.
Lazarus real problem, looks to be that they refused to embrace using it for mobile development. Which is odd. Almost as if Delphi's owner wouldn't allow it. Lazarus seems to handicap itself, for unknown reasons. They finally and kind of have an Android solution, from an independent contributor, but it doesn't blend so well with the desktop solution.
> Lazarus real problem, looks to be that they refused to embrace using it for mobile development. Which is odd. Almost as if Delphi's owner wouldn't allow it. Lazarus seems to handicap itself, for unknown reasons. They finally and kind of have an Android solution, from an independent contributor, but it doesn't blend so well with the desktop solution.
I'd like to know more about this. Any links to the discussions? My google-fu is failing me right now.
That Lazarus can be used for Android, comes from jmpessoa[1]. He is an independent, that's not part of the developer team. Users were asking and begging, for years, for a Lazarus solution to develop mobile apps (check the OS section of their forum). The developers basically ignored and refused. Their users are still begging for an iOS solution. Even though, the person who jmpessoa looks to have partially got the idea from to create LAMW (Lazarus Android Module Wizard), used it to create iOS components (but many years ago).
So, even though Android and iOS modules could be more thoroughly integrated into Lazarus or they putting forth an integrated LCL based solution, they're not. That's very weird. From the perspective of how much more useful Lazarus can be, and from their users asking for it.
Lazarus uses LCL, which has many backends, of which Gtk is but one. But you can also use e.g. the Qt version: https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Qt5_Interface. On Windows, they have a native Win32 implementation of LCL, same as Delphi did in VCL.
What's wrong with Lazarus, compared to Delphi?