The Lazarus team announced the first release candidate of Lazarus 1.8. The release is available for download at the SourceForge download page. Choose your CPU, OS, distro and then the “Lazarus 1.8 RC1” directory.

Lazarus is an open-source development system that builds on the Free Pascal compiler by adding an integrated development environment (IDE) that includes a syntax-highlighting code editor and visual form designer, as well as a component library that’s highly compatible with Delphi’s Visual Component Library (VCL).