I wish some company started promoting Lazarus. It's a great product and has a wonderful community, but the whole project somehow lacks enough traction to make it a serious alternative to more mainstream tools. I bet the moment a big player backs it up the attitude of developers will change. You can really produce prototypes of native apps rapidly.

Lazarus and Free Pascal has made me return to the wonderful world of RAD and Object Pascal. :)

I was a Delphi addict in the 90's. After Borland screwed up Delphi - including the Kylix disaster - and since I am now a full time Linux user - Lazarus is the only option.

I have been following the Lazarus / Free Pascal project for years, and I think now is a good time to pick it up.

I wish that it had more traction, though.

No traction because it's a mess. No git, no markdown, no clear organization, dated look in almost everything. Very unuserfriedly to just 'hop in'. No money unfortunately and most (all?) devs do it in their sparetime. Splitted between different attempts, FreePascal, MSE, Oxygene, Smartpascal, Newpascal, maybe more?

Nevertheless, Lazarus and Free Pascal is very good and important work. Wish they would modernize to the 21 century though (but whatever works for them is fine - only it's difficult regarding the traction then).

I am actively using Lazarus. It is not split into anything other than Free Pascal (the language) and Lazarus (IDE and visual component library).

Don't blame the forks, mods and spin offs on Lazarus / Free Pascal. It is a sign that the project is alive and doing well, IMO.

The looks? It looks like any other Qt / GTK 2/3 application. Fairly modern.

But I agree with you on some of the points - but the part that I like the best is the fact that it's fully open source. It's really nice to be able to look at the source to everything when developing your own applications.

Yes, the site itself, including the docs, looks dated and does a poor job of selling it. That's Open Source, the good and the bad.

Edit: The project does have a (mandatory these days, I reckon) Github mirror, if that would make you more happy. :)

Other than being Pascal based, Oxygene has no relation to freepascal or delphi.

I'd also think "It's $1400 cheaper than Delphi" would be a good selling point.

I started using Turbo Pascal in college when it was $49. Given that Embarcadero Delphi is competing with a lot of stuff that is free and high-quality, I doubt it's got anywhere to go but down from here.

I payed around 100 € (direct conversion) for Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, back in the day.

One reason Borland lost us was when they decided to go after the enterprise market, with comparable prices.

Borland screwed up across the board. There's an entertaining, if somewhat depressing, discussion of their woes in Merrill Chapman's "In Search of Stupidity".