> As a user of Hacker News, I don't care that it's open-source, cross-platform or written in Lazarus.
Any piece of software being open source is generally a good thing, since it's less likely that such projects might die off and disappear without someone (even yourself) being able to maintain them, or even add features/fix bugs.
Being cross platform is also a great quality, especially since otherwise you might find yourself using different pieces of software on different OSes, which might be a bit cumbersome. For example, there is no Notepad++ on Linux (using Wine is a bit suboptimal) and so you might find yourself looking in the direction of something like Notepadqq, but obviously it might not give you 1:1 the same experience. That's not the case with something like Visual Studio Code, or even CudaText!
And finally, it's always great to see Lazarus software, it's one of the nicer ways to create GUI software and largely sidesteps some of the framework related issues that other languages face, thanks to its lcl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Component_Library
> And finally, it's always great to see Lazarus software, it's one of the nicer ways to create GUI software and largely sidesteps some of the framework related issues that other languages face...
The insanity involved around hating on Object Pascal is just a damn shame. Other languages wish they had something like Lazarus or Delphi.
Lazarus is fantastic, for the desktop. And so are a lot of software projects created with Lazarus. The few gripes that I have with the project, is the very odd refusal to fully embrace mobile development.
They have a kind of half-way solution, for just Android and not iOS, from an independent developer not on the Lazarus team and who they seem to want to keep at an arm's length. I don't know if Embarcadero (Delphi) is paying them to not touch mobile development, but it's quite weird that they don't want to go in that very obvious direction. Lazarus as a complete solution for both the desktop and mobile, would have people shook. However, the clock is ticking, because there are a number of more comprehensive desktop and mobile development solutions coming. Lazarus should have and arguably could have come out with their combined solution years ago. But, as it is, they are great for the desktop. Nobody can take that away from them.
I've heard these arguments before and they sound good in theory, however in real life I haven't seen it work that way.
Projects dying off depends on developing a revenue stream or being backed by some company with a real revenue stream. Never solely about being open source. I have another comment about this when I talk about Lazarus below.
Being cross-platform sounds great in theory. However, most users don't use multiple OSes. Also, being cross-platform is extremely hard... for early-stage software you're better off making it work well on one platform, then extending when you achieve some traction with users. Being cross-platform with one tech also removes the chances of benefitting of platform specific APIs that might make it work better.
Lazarus, while I find it easy to get enthusiastic about, I'm old enough to have gone through a couple of cycles. The reason Electron with all its issues (memory consumption, app size) is winning is because there's a mass of developers that know how to build apps with HTML/JS/CSS. Like Haskell or OCaml or other awesome languages, if there's no mass of people that can contribute, the ecosystem never takes off — and ecosystem is the main trait of languages taking off. This is why an OSS project written in Lazarus using some relatively unknown UI APIs is unlikely to survive — I hope it does though.
As a user of "Hacker" News, you are potentially .... a hacker, who is quite likely to care if it is possible to hack on it in general (hence it matters that its open source) and you also likely care if it is easy for you to hack on it in particular (hence the implementation and plugin languages matter too).
Let's consider Visual Studio Code. It's OSS — still, I read the codebase a couple of times and I wouldn't venture into hacking into it — it's too large.
Being OSS enables hackability, it doesn't provide or guarantee it.
I wasn't claiming that OSS necessarily enables a specific individual to be able to hack on it.
Just in case of your example if as a TS programmer I learn about a new code IDE that is open source and is written in TS, I might be more motivated to go check it out and explore it. So that fact does deserve mentioning - that is all I was saying. Whether or not I eventually end up contributing to it depends on a lot of factors and is besides the point.
Hacker News is a largely technical community. If there was any community that would respond to your product being open source, interoperable, or written in a niche language, this would be it.
As a user of Hacker News, I don't care that it's open-source, cross-platform or written in Lazarus.