For our March 2019 “Community Choice” Project of the Month, the community elected Lazarus, rapid applications development tool and libraries for FPC. Lazarus was previously elected “Community Choice” Project of the Month in August 2017 where developer Mattias Gaertner spoke about the project’s developments and direction. Recently we caught up with Mattias to find out how the project has been doing since then.

SourceForge (SF): What significant changes have occurred with your project since you were voted Project of the Month in August 2017?

Mattias Gaertner (MG): All the next big things promised when Lazarus was last time Sourceforge project of the month have been achieved: QT5, Cocoa for Mac OS, Gtk3, Pas2js and the Online package manager. The Online package manager (OPM) allows finally to browse, download and install packages with a few clicks. Pas2js is now fully supported by Lazarus and allows to write Web and nodejs applications in ObjectPascal and compile to JavaScript. The Cocoa backend was improved so much, that the IDE now runs almost better than the carbon version. Besides these successes, there are some more: lldb debugging on macOS, better High DPI support and of course hundreds of bug fixes, minor features, and more packages.

SF: Have any of your project goals changed since then?

MG: No.

SF: What project goals have you achieved so far?

MG: Lazarus nowadays supports a dozen platforms in its official releases and many more platforms are maintained by third parties. The visual designer allows to create whole applications with a few mouse clicks. The IDE supports true x-platform editing and navigation. Over the years many more goals have been added, like better Delphi compatibility, converters, Web development and hundreds of packages for all kinds of stuff – a whole eco system.

SF: What can we look forward to with Lazarus?

MG: Creating Web apps using the designer, Cocoa and lldb as default backends on macOS, Lazarus qt5 debs/rpms.

SF: Is there anything else we should know?

MG: A big thanks to the community for voting Lazarus as project of the month, for sending so many the patches and all the other contributions.

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