As many might know, FPC announced support for anonymous methods some days ago. This was one of the last pieces missing for us to be able to port TMS FlexCel to Lazarus and FPC. 

So we decided to give it a try, and after a couple of days fixing stuff, we could make it compile. It wasn’t simple, there were internal compiler errors, there is missing functionality that had to be rewritten, and we haven’t reached 100% of the code, but most is compiling. Of course, compiling it is one thing, but getting it to work is a different matter. When we tried, we couldn’t create a simple xls or xlsx file. After a couple more days, we could get first xlsx and then xls working. We needed to do some patching in fpc, and we needed to workaround  some other stuff, but that’s the point where we are at right now. All of FlexCel code is compiling. It works in simple cases, but we haven’t tried our test suite yet.

You can see here a little video of Lazarus in a M1 mac (but running as intel under rosetta) of me creating a simple xlsx file.

And now comes the big question. Would you like us to spend more time on it so we add Lazarus support, or do we stop it now and focus in FlexCel for Delphi and FlexCel .NET as usual?  While we now have simple apps working, we won’t launch “Lazarus support” unless we have all tests passing, and FlexCel tests are quite difficult to pass. I expect some extra weeks of work to make it all pass.

At least for now, we would focus in supporting Windows, OSX and Linux. No plans for iOS or Android.

Important: To release support for Lazarus, we will require using the Trunk release until the current trunk is promoted to stable.

We would really be interested in your opinion. If you want to share it with us, please answer the poll below or let us know what you think in the comments.