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Comment by badsectoracula

5 hours ago

Free Vision, included with Free Pascal is basically that. The text mode IDE[0] uses Free Vision.

The main issue is that Free Vision (and Turbo Vision) uses the original "object" types introduced in Turbo Pascal 5.5 instead of "class" types introduced in Delphi which make a lot of things easier (e.g. the "class" RTTI allows for enough reflection to implement automatic serialization of objects, but "object" types do not have that and Free/Turbo Vision require manual serialization with registration of the VMT pointer -accessed via a fixed offset in object pointers- as a means to distinguish at runtime between different types). Free Pascal adds a few of the niceties of "class" types to "object" types (like private/protected/public sections -TP objects are all public- and properties) but Free Vision doesn't use those as it implements the original Turbo Vision API.

[0] https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/images/1/19/Userscreen.p...