Languages, tools, and the craft of writing code that lasts.
10 articles
Newest first
Many Delphi and Lazarus projects are still built on one developer's machine with no tests and no pipeline. This article brings the habits from my day job to Object Pascal: DUnitX and FPCUnit, command-line builds, an Azure Pipelines build, pinned dependencies, and the security basics that come almost for free.
The one rule of desktop threading is that only the main thread touches the user interface. Here is how to follow it in Object Pascal with TThread, Synchronize and Queue, how to stop a thread cleanly, how to share data safely, and where Delphi's parallel library fits in.
A browser-free dashboard for the sensors in my home lab, built with Lazarus directly on a Raspberry Pi. Subscribing to MQTT topics in a background thread, plotting with TAChart, running full-screen as a kiosk, and the practical details of building on ARM.
Desktop tools rarely live alone anymore. This article fetches readings from a REST endpoint with a bearer token and parses the JSON response, first with Delphi's THTTPClient and System.JSON, then with Free Pascal's fphttpclient and fpjson, with notes on timeouts and TLS.
Most desktop tools need a local database, and SQLite is the obvious choice. Here is the same small readings database built twice, with FireDAC in Delphi and SQLdb in Lazarus, plus the deployment, parameter and date handling details that matter in the field.
Coming from C# or Java, manual memory management is the scariest part of Object Pascal. It does not need to be. Five ownership rules, the try..finally pattern, component owners, reference-counted interfaces, and the tools that catch leaks before your users do.
Build a small temperature log viewer in Lazarus, from installing the IDE to a working chart, and then compile the same source on Windows and Linux. Includes the layout, file handling and platform gotchas that catch newcomers.
A tour of modern Object Pascal for people who remember Turbo Pascal from school. Units, records with methods, classes and interfaces, generics and anonymous methods, with notes on where Free Pascal differs from Delphi.
Both Delphi and Lazarus compile the same language, so which one should you learn? I compare licensing, platforms, component libraries, tooling and community, and finish with the questions I ask before choosing one for a project.
Twenty years after I wrote my last serious Delphi program, I installed Delphi Community Edition and Lazarus on the same evening. Here is why Object Pascal still earns a place on my workbench, and a few questions I am still chewing on.