Lazarus gives you cross-platform and multiple architecttures at no cost. From what I recall, Lazarus is a more lightweight install, while the Delphi IDE has better coding features. For the classic VCL (Delphi has other new frameworks), I haven't found anything that LCL cannot do yet, but I don't do anything unusual with the widgets. The FreePascal language is mostly compatible, however, they don't plan to strictly follow newer Delphi language features (e.g. inline declarations).
Lazarus was crap. That was the reason why it never replaced Delphi in the first place.
Compiler was slow by comparison to get anything compiled, produced 10x bigger binaries. The IDE for GUI wasn't something to brag about and the help system (yes, Delphi actually had code snippets built into the docs) was dramatically worse.
Delphi 7 was a masterpiece. Haven't tried Lazarus in the last 10 years. Hopefully many of my critics have become obsolete by now.
I did Delphi dev for about 10 years. For me it was Delphi 5 that was the king (I did use every version prior to that too.. including version 1). Delphi 6 added CLX and that was weird and awkward. No where I was working wanted to go to Delphi 6+, and I left Delphi in about 2007 anyway, so all the Embarcadero years are a mystery to me. I worked for a company that had a relationship with Borland and I have early versions of Kylix (I think the first version I saw, the IDE barely worked) - and that sort of made some sense of CLX, but the upgrade path was way way too steep.
Would I ever go back to Delphi/Object Pascal? In a word - no.
Same feelings here. Did the same in 2010 and jumped boat to Java. After almost 17 years on Pascal for serious/intensive programming, nowadays don't even remember the syntax basics.
I spent years in the Delphi ecosystem, starting with Delphi 1. In the early years, it was a great tool for building desktop apps. I haven't used it in 15+ years, but no regrets.
The $5k limit for the Community Edition is very limiting. Unless you are a student with no income, you'll hit the limit almost immediately. Even if you were to write an app for a non-profit, you'll hit the limit.
