Lazarus

Since first stable release (v. 1.0, August 28, 2012) improvements are really fast. Good community support. Yes, it's not as mature as Delphi but:

• You can create fully functional real applications fast. Lazarus is ready for writing commercial applications too.
• transition from Delphi to Lazarus/FPC is not hard; lot of code You can copy/paste with minor changes (not talking about VCL/LCL conversion).
• it is cross platform. One can't expect platform dependent components to be integrated in the IDE. Yet you can use them if you don't need cross development.
• it has not fully docked GUI, but its not so hard to get used with.
• there is a component repository Lazarus CCR. There are few components compared to Delphi but things may change fast.
• debugger needs improvements but it does its work with some minor hacks (something like MyStringList.FList[0]^ for stringlists for example).
• integrated reporting tool, LazReport, is really good.
• third party DB components Zeoslib fully working.
• CodeTyphon is a distro of Lazarus with many components preinstalled. I prefer Lazarus because is more stable and I use CodeTyphon to install some of it's components in Lazarus IDE.

If You need a free and stable RAD give Lazarus a chance. Lazarus Team did a great job.

If it doesn't fit your needs, you can change it and contribute. If there's a bug - you can fix it and contribute it, but at least you can open an issue at lazarus mantis issue tracker.

I've been a Delphi programmer since Delphi 1, and I have been using Lazarus for a few years now. Yes it has it's limitation (it's cross platform - so you're more so talking about the limitations of what several platforms share or not, or handle in a similar way), but consider this;

• it is truly cross platform (I develop on a Mac and deploy Mac, Windows, and Linux apps)
• it is FREE ...!
• the Lazarus community is very open to developers participating in improving Lazarus

Granted ... it's probably not for everybody ... but I think it's great!

Could be a good thing if they work out better with interface. But right now it just unusable with all that Delphi 7 like mess with windows. They should implement MDI TDI interface...

Delphi is a computer software that is made to learn and focus on what you would build a project for;

Lazarus-IDE eventually breaks this focus in order to understand range of Open Source concepts, on which project advancements are not already built on the Lazarus Tool or forced into the open source logics;

There is a list of IDEs that list C# as alternative, yet it's not an IDE. VS, SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop - those are C# IDEs that are alternatives. While C# is alternative to languages - Pascal, C++, Java etc

Lazarus
Delphi
Free Pascal

Things keep improving, but very slowly. Still no fully Integrated Development Environment. There are few options, but all 3 main options are incomplete - GlassDocking does not ingrate Form Designer and does not save tabbed panels, KzDesktop does intergrate it, but does not have customizable panels. AnchorDocking is even less featured than GlassDocking. No separate interface settings for debug and development. No Welcome Page as well. Still no cross-platform capabilities out of box. CodeInsight is very primitive, reminds more of Delphi 7. Personally I can't live now without Delphi's CnWizard's Code Competition. It much more superior. Not talking about Visual Studio's IntelliSense. It appears also community support isn't good enough as well, since most of popular mods, like CnWizard and GExpert doesn't get ports or even integrated. If developers want their thing to be popular, then they have to work mod developers and help them to port or integrate their features into Lazarus. But it seems it doesn't happen. No Component/Mod Portal as well - it needs to have something where developers could publish their componenents and mods with ability to search and install them right from Lazarus. There is a third-party destro of Lazarus called CodeTyphon. It has most of most popular components and mods in its bundle, which helps the situation for newbies somehow. It's just slight view. Haven't been digging deep into debugging, deployment etc.

Lazarus great. It is easy to create a first application with the graphical form editor, and thanks to the elegant Free Pascal language it generates fast and efficient code for several operating systems (including Linux, Mac and Windows) and processor architectures (Arm, Intel, PPC and others). Therefore, Lazarus is the first choice for cross platform development.