Comment by speakspokespok
1 month ago
Lazarus and Open Pascal is fun!
And so it drives me crazy to see the state of their documentation. The wiki needs to be archived and replaced with a coherent documentation platform. It’s such a turn off. The whole website is a SWAG site frankly.
‘ SWAG sites
SWAG is an archive of tips and example programs for Turbo Pascal/Borland Pascal and early Delphi. Much of it is still applicable to today's Object Pascal - and much is obsolete...’
How can a language compete when a new user sees this?
> It’s such a turn off.
Is this the wiki you somehow want to have removed? https://wiki.freepascal.org/
It seems perfectly fine, information-dense even which is even better. Seems a lot better than the typical one-long-landing-page-docs many languages have today. What exactly is the problem with the wiki that cannot be fixed and must be re-made from scratch?
The wiki is full of incomplete, obsolete, or otherwise not-so-useful articles. It suffers from typical "wiki as documentation" efforts, where instead of concentrated efforts from domain experts, you get a thousand half-baked opinions.
It has good stuff, but I'd wager the "bad stuff" outweighs it by a large margin.
Thank you for your response and your example.
The problem is optics. Pretend I'm a brand new user and I want to build GUI applications. I've heard of a language called Freepascal and of an IDE called Lazarus. I think they're connected but I don't know how. And what's Delphi?
Where do I start?
? Welcome to the Free Pascal and Lazarus Wiki [2] https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/
? Lazarus Documentation https://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Documentation
? Welcome to the Free Pascal and Lazarus Wiki [1] https://wiki.freepascal.org/
? https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
Most IDEs and languages have a Documentation link. Which link do I use to start with?
FreePascal has lazarus docs and Lazarus has FreePascal docs?
As a new user I can slog through 4 different links of schtuff, I guess. (Disappointment and frustration lie ahead; broken old buggy software that doesn't match the documentation. New User doesn't know that yet.) Maybe I'll just look for Youtube videos, but my enthusiasm is draining.
I'm used to this:
https://go.dev/doc/ Everything linked from go.dev/doc works today and it's coherent. Everything.
As other responses mention, the docs as a rule are out of date and confusing.
[1] btw redirects to [2] from search engines.
> And so it drives me crazy to see the state of their documentation.
I talked about this in my article about the release:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/09/new_lazarus_4/
The only relevant part I can find from that article is:
> One criticism we've seen of the FreePascal project in general concerns its documentation, although there is quite a lot of it: eight FPC manuals, and lengthy Lazarus docs in multiple languages. There is a paid-for tutorial e-book available, too.
The criticism is that there is too much documentation available? And they're long, and dare even to be available in multiple languages?
No. You are incorrectly chaining statements.
* Many criticise the docs; * There _are_ docs, and a lot of them.
This is not an "A therefore B" proposition.
It is offering 2 points, not positing a connection:
"The docs are not very good." AND "Docs do exist, lots of them."
In other words: there are docs, lots and lots of docs, but they are not very good.
For instance, specifically, the indexing and cross-referencing is, I am told, poor.
Too much documentation, if badly organised, can be as bad as too little.
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I stopped using the Lazarus documentation a year ago when the AI prompts (which seem to be trained on the actual documentation) became easier and faster to use.
Also AI also seems to get above average results with pascal code generation IMHO.
Interesting, which AI system are you using?
This doesn't match my own experiences, I've tried a few times to ask about Pascal and the results have always been appallingly bad. From nonsensical syntax (sometimes mixing in C-style syntax), to made up unit and object names, I'm surprised if it can even manage a correct "hello, world".
By comparison, Python generation can be pretty decent (not that it can't run into the same issues, but it is less frequent). I always assume it's because Pascal's online presence is gravely reduced compared to other languages. It is still a fairly popular language, but I'd wager most Pascal written is not published online.
The main issue is they often try to write code using dated/unsupported packages, but simply asking them not to use any out of date components or units will give you a baseline to do most things or from first principles.
Gemini 2.5 was the last one I used for generating an interface to a really old OLE based SCADA system, the base code it generated required almost no re-work to read and write the interface.