The Wahyudiharto's Blog

Get checked this out after friend of friend told me about the (very) multi platform compiler existed. It named Lazarus, an open source compiler project published at sourceforge.net. The developers are too serious to work on it since it released on 3 different OS platform simultaneously! Window$, Linux (RPM & Debian packages) & Mac OS.

The latest version are 0.9.2 & the whole stuffs is available to download. I tried to download the both version Window$ & Linux since it is important to support my incoming projects. I'd like to compared, make a short reviews & this is my first article.

Window$ setup file come in a single exe package. The size is quite small for ordinary compiler, it's only 49Mb. While Linux version are come in 2 packages. One package are the Lazarus RPM core with the size of 48Mb & the rest is the compiler source, nearly 18Mb.

Generally, I guessed that this product was designed on top of the Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) but it was true indeed. I had installed on both machine Window$ XP & Fedora Core 4 Linux (with custom kernel 2.6.17), there were no problem at all. The Lazarus splash shown continued by it IDE’s loading progress. The IDE's is similarly look like Delphi but it’s not compatible with the Delphi Projects DPR files. There are multiple window covered the monitor. The components tabs are arranged & so comprehensive included it’s native support with common database server such as Oracle, PostgreSQL & MySQL (version 4.0, 4.1, 5.x).



I tried to analyzed a default project loaded & I found that the source architectures was completely same as Delphi had. Off course there was a little bit differences with the initialization header & the compiler directives. I tried to put a button on the form and added a Delphi close application syntax. The compilation command are followed by a shortcut key Ctrl+F9, an usual way with Pascal.

The compilation result will created an EXE file on Window$, while Linux will created an ELF binary executable file. The next interesting part is the executable file size. It was 600% larger than an executable file created with Delphi. 6700Kb compared to 300Kb with it’s default form equipped a button & a close command. I though that the problem was related to the incomplete code optimization or something.

Tomorrow, I’ll post the next article regarding to database link within Lazarus native component

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