Firstly the blow smoke - I have always been impressed at the effort, complexity, simplicity put into this project basically as a free environment - it is nothing short of amazing. Was a Lazarus developer many years ago, moved to Delphi.
Please bear with me.
Background:
I am coming from the Delphi world after converting an application and DLLs to FMX then trying to port to OSX. There is no 64bit compiler in Delphi. The experience on the Mac side has been frustrating and what should have been a fairly simple conversion has turned into a mini-nightmare wasting several weeks and getting nowhere. Sometimes the code works, then I get, for example, and Access Violation at load time (DYLIB loads, simple test app generates AV). There is essentially no debug info and I don't even get the log.d statement from the Application Initialize Block. OK I get it TL;DR
So, many year ago i was a Lazarus guy and went over to commercial Delphi. I am now thinking I should be back in the Lazarus camp, you operate native on OSX. That's great, but my knowledge is limited. Because I will be writing DYLIBs that need to be accessed by other developers using ObjectiveC and SWIFT, I need 64 bit DYLIBs and apps. Delphi does not have a 64 bit compiler and not due until whenever (taken off the roadmap).
Pardon my ignorance, but I see comments like ... yes, Lazarus is 64 bit, but not for LCL? I thought the LCL was the basis of Lazarus (as is VCL/FMX for Delphi). What does this even mean?
FWIW, I'm running High Sierra and Xcode 9.4.1 because Delphi doesn't run on Mojave and it has issues with SDK 14 (which is the only option if you install Xcode 10), all on a Parallels VM.
Questions:
I guess my initial question is quite simple, can I build 64bit apps on their OSX deployed version of Lazarus?
Do I need to do anything to invoke the 64bit compiler or is that what will be used if I build on OSX?
I converted my Apps/DLLs/DYLIBs to FMX for the cross-platform options, meh. I see comments like the converter will not convert FMX only VCL.
How do you recommend that I do the conversion, do I just plunk the code into a Lazarus library or unit and build removing errors one by one?
I have some libraries where there are Lazarus equivalents (TMS FMX/VCL/LCL Cloud Pack, the TMS people are unhelpful if you do anything like put their units in a DLL/DYLIB - we have never done that, we have had no demand, it's too complicated....), and some where there are not, for example I use TMutithread in a DLL/DYLIB. I am hoping there are LCL equivalents.
I am sure I will have many other questions, but for now...
Thanks,
Kevin