Topic: Lazarus is a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Free Pascal RAD

[Software Santa]

Lazarus is a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Free Pascal Rapid Application Development

What is Lazarus?
Lazarus is a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development. It has variety of components ready for use and a graphical form designer to easily create complex graphical user interfaces.

Highlights:
    Open Source
    Written in Pascal for Pascal
    Cross-platform
    Over 200 Components
    Many Frameworks
    Extendable through packages
    Converts from Delphi code
    Regular Releases


What can it do?
You can create your own open source or commercial applications. With Lazarus you can create file browsers, image viewers, database applications, graphics editing software, games, 3D software, medical analysis software or any other type of software.

Where to learn?
Lazarus has a huge community of people supporting each other. It include scientists and students, pupils and teachers, professionals and hobbyists. Our wiki provides tutorials, documentations and ideas. Our forums and mailing-list offer a space to ask questions and talk to users and the developers.


Features
Some of the features Lazarus has to offer:

Freedom
    LGPL licensed [1][2] libraries allow you to create your own applications under any license you desire. Even commercial closed source.
    GPL licensed IDE
    Cross Platform IDE. Work on your favourite system.
    Platform independent projects out of the box. Simply copy your project to another platform and compile it.
    Build native binaries. Distribute your binaries without dependencies on any runtime environment. [3]

Ease of use
    Installer, with all required files available
    Easy Drag & Drop Form designer to create powerful layouts
    Automatic synchronization between GUI-Forms and code
    Powerful code editor with syntax highlighting and code completion
    Navigate pascal source code
    Refactoring tools
    Integrated build system and debugger. Run, test and debug your projects from the IDE

Extensibility
    Open Source. You can add or modify existing code and components to meet your requirements
    Lazarus package system allows to install 3rd party add ons for more components or to extend the IDE
    Several database frameworks to meet your requirements
    Reporting and Charting
    A choice of Networking libraries available.
    Utf8 and i18n support. Translate your projects.
    Many more components. Build in and for download


[1] LGPL with additional permission to link libraries into your binaries.
[2] Some additional packages come with various licenses such as GPL, MPL, ...
[3] Linux/BSD applications may depend on GTK2 or alternatively QT.


Cross Platform
Lazarus runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and many other platforms. Even on Raspberry Pi! The programs you create also runs on these platforms. Enjoy the same experience on your favorite OS. See Installing Lazarus for OS-specific instructions for installation.

Powerful, Fast
Lazarus is a capable IDE for handling large projects. Its compiler FPC is being constantly developed to improve performance. As an example for the project size the IDE can handle, and the performance of the resulting application: The Lazarus IDE itself is developed using Lazarus.

Drag and Drop Form Designer
Lazarus has a graphical form designer with guidelines for aligning with adjacent components. There are numerous components for almost every software imaginable, already ready to be used. Further components can be added to the IDE by Lazarus Package Files (LPKs).

Cross-platform
Lazarus form designer uses LCL (Lazarus Component Library) which is especially designed for cross platform usage. Building your project for different platforms will give you native look and feel on each platform. There are no changes to the project needed.

Modern, Object oriented language
Lazarus uses Free Pascal as its language which is an Object Pascal dialect. It is constantly developed to integrate new features that can be expected in modern programming languages.

Easily Extendable
Hundreds of developers are developing and maintaining their Lazarus Libraries and Lazarus Packages (LPKs). You can find almost any kind of library that you may need.


Open source
Lazarus is open source and the core libraries [4] are distributed under LGPL with the extra permission of static linking. So you can create non-commercial and commercial applications with it.
[4] This applies to LCL, FCL, RTL. It covers all the standard components and many other. Some of the packages with extra components may be GPL, MPL or other

Frameworks
Various Frameworks are available which saves your time on certain codebase.

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=downloads