Free Pascal compiler now supports dynamic packages

Awesome work. It's great to have a FOSS alternative while (Embarcadero) Delphi gets worse with every new release.

Congratulations!

Pascal/Lazarus/Delphi strike such a nice balance of responsiveness in the development lifecycle.

Congratulations on the achievement, and to everyone that made it happen.

Similar to Delphi packages I assume.

The page lists a FPC 3.2.3 while the official is 3.2.2 with 3.2.4 in RC2. I do not understand it.

Congratulations!

I have been running the website getlazarus.org for 13 years to support add features to both FPC and Lazarus that jump ahead of the normal releases. We have been working of dynamic packages for a long time, and there will be a period between now, and when it is sent as a MR back into the mainline. When enough time has passed and feedback given these features are typically rolled into the main release, and at getlazarus I move on towards developing the next features.

That's interesting, I thought Claude or Codex would be really good with it. I've been doing some FPC/Lazarus work with Gemini 3.8 Flash, working on a program that creates STLs, DXFs, and SVGs of involute gears for machining or 3-d printing with a nice "Gear Designer" and visual preview and the code has been perfect. I enjoy building the UI and write the UI logic myself, but the exporters and gear calculations are beyond my capabilities and everything Gemini's done has been basically flawless. I have no dependencies beyond the RTL and LCL, not using any libraries to help with the format exports. Seem's like the opinion here is that Claude and ChatGPT do way better code than Gemini, so I'm surprised you've had issues.

The only minor problems I've had is Gemini went through a phase where it was using semi-colons improperly in if statements, which is something everybody messes up with Pascal, so forgivable, I'm sure if I was using an agent rather than the web interface it would have figured it out from compiler errors right away. That and sometimes with UI stuff it would hallucinate methods or properties for components that are part of commercial delphi components, but I've only ran in to this 2 or 3 times.

When I first started on this project I believe we were on early Gemini 3 and I will say it's handling of Pascal constructs was quite rough, it seemed to have a lot of trouble with the verbosity. Lot's of extra tokens to grok the structure vs something like C or Go. But from 3.5 onwards it's been flawless.

Maybe it's just one of those things Gemini is simply better at. I'd much rather read Gemini prose than Claude, and Pascal is definitely closer to natural language than something like Rust might be. On the other end of the language spectrum I find it is incredibly good with Go as well, I think Google might have a bit of an edge as far as high quality training material for that language goes.

I think Pascal, as in it's modern dialect Object Pascal used in Delphi and FPC/Lazarus is a sort of "hidden language". You won't see many big Open Source projects using it and there's only a handful of big commercial packages using it, but behind the scenes for domain-specific/in-house software it is used quite a bit. It allows small teams or individuals to very quickly put together software that is used by the business departments or engineering/technical with modern GUIs and good performance. It's exactly what it says on the package, "Rapid Application Development". Stuff like Rust and Go are great, but having to code out the entire UI by hand basically doubles the maintenance/development burden and requires a lot of knowledge about the widgetsets and their libs. QT Creator, Glade/Cambalanche, wxFormBuilder are nice, but there's a decoupling there that adds complexity and they all require C/C++ if you want native code. WinForms/WPF on .NET in Visual Studio probably come the closest to what you get, but it's mostly Windows specific and I wasn't able to pick it up easy like I was Delphi.

FPC and Lazarus are really amazing tools. FPC itself is quite a competent compiler with many available platforms including legacy platforms, Java VM, WASM. Very fast compilation, run time perf is not quite C++ especially with strings, but fast enough. Even Lazarus LCL programs are quite lean and efficient for what they are. The RTL/FCL are comprehensive with tons of functionality, things like string handling, containers, math, all there and everything you expect.

The killer app with Lazarus is it's cross platform GUI capabilities. The last release is still stuck on Gtk2, but trunk Gtk3 is default on Linux with QT5 and QT6 available, Cocoa, and Win32 and for the most part it just works. You build for GTK or Qt, you switch to Win32 and compile a native windows app. The RTL abstracts most of the OS stuff like file handling and threads, and the LCL handles the widgetsets. There's nothing else even close when it comes to cross platform development of desktop apps.

Check out:

- Delphi (https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/features/delphi)

- Lazarus & Free Pascal (https://www.lazarus-ide.org)

- Oxygene (https://www.remobjects.com/elements/oxygene/)

And since you remarked about "modern languages", have a look at https://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal

Enough to keep a conference going in Germany for years.

https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-eng

It still has a loyal fan base. :) And it evolved from the old Pascal of the 80s into Object Pascal, with extensions developed for Delphi, that eventually made their way back into the Free Pascal Compiler (fpc). Also people are developing even more modern language extensions and syntax for it (1), but let's see whether that catches on.

We're developing our game in Pascal, too, as our main coder is quite prolific in it. See this (2) discussion on HN about our game from about two weeks ago:

1. https://unleashedpascal.org/ 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49931993

The FLStudio DAW suite is written in Delphi.

I've shipped a few things to clients with it in the past 5 years.

Yeah, it’s just called golang

It's truly is a pity the world didn't discover just how great the Pascal bloodline was. Modula-3 was as powerful as C++ but 75% less complicated/complex/annoying. Still is.

That feature you mentioned was added by the Delphi team in support of closures. They way they developed it was jankey IMO, as it creates an interface behind the scenes and populate with information about the local stack.

Though I do very much appreciate C#, with its lambda functions, expression trees, and especially the tooling, Free Pascal and Lazarus exist as a happy compromise between those things and native code integration, where working with C libraries like libcairo, libxml2, libssl, libsdl, and opengl are much easier and a pleasure to work with when using Free Pascal, and conversely are more difficult to wrangle when using C# or Java.

see Unleashed Pascal - a community driven fork of FPC/Lazarus:

https://unleashedpascal.org/

I hope in time it also adopts the dynamic packages work in this thread.

There is some interesting innovation going on in the Pascal community (including AI, ML, Agent frameworks etc) - it is just not very visible in the wider tech world.

My website has been hosting downloads with alternate versions of the compiler and ide for nearly 15 years now. I also have published JsonTools, BareGame, TinySim, the original Shell Controls, and lots of other packages for the Lazarus community. The install scripts at https://www.getlazarus.org/setup simply download a seed compiler, the sources, and builds, while making certain it does not interfere with user's existing setups by restricting configuration settings to your chosen install folder. In other words, you can run my version and your existing version at the same time without any problems, and if you don't like my version the uninstall process is to delete a folder, and perhaps a shortcut if you copied it anywhere.

Which books?