Believe it or not, Lazarus is probably the single most-cross-platform-compatible GUI builder for native apps that exists, anywhere.

Neither Java, nor Qt nor anything else come even close. And the apps are native!

As for the "I don't like Pascal because Pascal is ugly" crowd: it's only different, and it's almost by chance (i.e. reasons external to the language itself) that most of today's production languages have used C for their syntax template; if they've used Pascal, then the C syntax would be the "ugly" one.

Microsoft has basically poached developers working on Delphi to develop the first versions of C# and it showed both in the design of the language (properties, the type system) and the early IDE.

"Believe it or not, Lazarus is probably the single most-cross-platform-compatible GUI builder for native apps that exists, anywhere."

Except they build on GTK 2, Qt 4, and Carbon on OSX. I haven't used it, but the whole LCL architecture seems absurd to me as there's no way that a project like theirs can keep things up to date.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/LCLArchi...

It's been 15 years since Lazarus (and thus LCL) was born and the following changes has happened:

- GTK1 interface is obsolete (was mainstream), GTK2 is mainstream, GTK3 is on the write - QT4 is mainstream, QT5 is on the write - Carbon is mainstream, Cocoa is near completion

I believe legacy already shows how the project can keep things up to date. It's the power of full community driven project, there's no necessity for a single maintainer to update everything on his own. Contributors may come and go, but they're there to update things.

From this image, the architecture looks similar to wxWidgets, which has been pretty successful. Why do you believe Lazarus cannot keep up?