Lazarus IDE has been around since 2001, and, y'know, the common source for the name dates back another 2000 years, right?

For those not familiar with the story, Lazarus was a dead guy that got resurected by Jesus of Nasareth in the New Testament.

As in, Pascal was all but dead (tha Java hype was happening with full force) and even the Delphi guys put their best efforts into making Delphi a C++ dialect, but this RAD IDE would resurect Pascal.

Turbo Pascal has been inspiring itself with C++ since Turbo Pascal 6.0.

Where Turbo Pascal 5.5. was basically the adoption of Object Pascal extensions from Apple.

So when Borland rebooted it into Delphi it already had 4 Turbo Pascal releases (5.5, 6.0, 7.0, 1.5 Windows) having such inspiration.

Ironically, while everyone is trying to reinvent the wheel how to interop with C++, Delphi and C++ Builder have been doing it for decades, with .NET and Objective-C++ being followers on that front.

Best of all, is that it allows for C++ like programming, with security belt on by default, but as usual the industry is full of left turns.

The name doesn't refer to a rise from the death of Pascal but an earlier FOSS Delphi clone.

"One of the original projects that made an attempt to build a Delphi clone was Megido. However this effort died. Lazarus as you know was the biblical figure that was raised from the dead by Christ. Soooooo. The project is named Lazarus as it was started/raised from the death of Megido."

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

Plus, unlike Delphi, Lazarus had support for the Linux too. Disclosure: Old Delphi dev

Today's Delphi does Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux:

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

Then you surely remember Kylix.

Modern Delphi does Linux just fine.

Kylix was such a failure! I remember being excited about it and then realized how wrong everything was: starting from licensing to Wine runtime.

Using Wine sounds perfect

Delphi's VCL is tied to much to the Windows API to work without it.

Even Lazarus implements a lot of Windows API like functions. E.g. you call one of these functions on Linux and it converts it to a corresponding gtk/qt function call: https://gitlab.com/freepascal.org/lazarus/lazarus/-/blob/mai...

But it is all less reliable because the Lazarus community is much smaller than the Wine community

> and even the Delphi guys put their best efforts into making Delphi a C++ dialect

In what way is Delphi a C++ dialect?

It is in the way that Object Pascal grew out of the basic set of extensions added by Apple.

From Turbo Pascal 5.5 onwards, the language slowly adopted C++ features, while giving them a Pascal flavour.

Class accessors, generics, const variables, construction/destruction, value based OOP, virtual methods are some of those influences.

When Borland rebooted the product line into Delphi and C++ Builder, they got symbiotic.

In Delphi you can easily use libraries written in C++ Builder, and vice versa, while C++ Builder provides a similar GUI RAD experience.

I don't think that was actually correct, but Borland did release C++Builder in the 90s that looked and felt just like Delphi, other than the language beneath.

Yes, C++ Builder uses the same IDE and makes use of a lot of the same libraries, but it's still C++ and Delphi is still Object Pascal:

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder

There's now some Python support too:

https://www.embarcadero.com/new-tools/python

To paraphrase from somewhere -- "why should they change their name? It's the other guys that suck."

Office Space reference: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tyVZFm7P0CQ

Hmmmm, didn't know. But of a shame, but wasn't intentional. Perhaps they should call it Methuselah?