Last night I I was reading some of the latest articles on Jon lennart Aasenden’s blog about Quartex. For those of you not following Jon on Google+ he is the founder of the DelphiArmy and the author of the Smart Mobile Studio IDE. Quartex is an IDE for multiple languages (including Object Pascal) that Jon is working on that is to include the transcoding of languages. IOW, you could take Delphi code and transcode it to C++ or C#. The approach is to use the LDEF intermediate format, and from there you could either convert to a different language or compile it into binary code.
Quartex will be built on Jon’s cross platform framework and experience, and he is looking for others to join in. If the effort proves successful there could be another IDE choice other than Lazarus for XPlatform work. Imagine, a native IDE on the Mac compiling for OS/X or iOS, or a Linux IDE targeting Linus and Android. No more networking between machines with intermediate apps like PAServer, or using VMs to target mobile devices.
No more .NET subsystems like ErrorInsight that produces lots of false positives and never gets fixed. No more modelling support that no one uses, Refactoring that works some of the time and blows up out of memory or never comes back and no more half baked features that are abandoned. If Quartex ends up open source, and you find a bug that bugs you enough, you can fix it yourself or hire someone to do so.
Product direction would be a community decision, and both voting with your voice and your wallet would yield results. Object Pascal as a language would have a much better chance of surviving! It’s either that, or we continue with the high # of Quality Portal issue reports, and articles like this one that show how EMBT’s strategy is working in terms of quality (72 reports over the last 30 days without a single resolution).
I also thought I would mention that Marco has been on the EMBT quality portal. Good to see someone from EMBT providing an explanation of the complexity of the issue and what they’re doing.