Lazarus, the free cross-platform Delphi-like IDE for the Free Pascal Compiler, has reached Version 1.0 after more than ten years of development.

Lazurus may be niche, but it has an enthusiastic community. It uses Free Pascal as its back-end compiler and so can, theoretically, be used to develop applications for all platforms supported by Free Pascal - which includes Windows, Linux, OSX and more.

Object Pascal/Delphi were 11th in the TIOBE rankings at the start of the year - which isn't quite in the top ten but still enough to beat Ruby. Pascal was once the academic language of choice and this might account for its persistence.

It's syntax is almost exactly the same as Delphi and its run-time library, the Lazarus Component Library (LCL) provides a single, unified interface for programmers, with different platform-specific implementations. Using LCL, one can create applications in a write once, compile anywhere manner. The compiler also produces machine code that runs fast and efficient.

The release is available for download at the SourceForge download page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/.