[linux-audio-dev] About Kylix, music, Linux, etc.

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

Hi all,

I'm not a Pascal fanatic at all. Furthermore, i don't consider myself as a 
fanatic in any sense. Well, perhaps i spend too much time with computers, and 
i love them as much as i love music. And i love Pascal too, as much as i love 
Linux. So, when Delphi landed in Linux incarnated as Kylix, it made me very 
happy. From an ethic point of view i would prefer Free Pascal,  
(www.freepascal.org) but Linux is already some kind of market, and there are 
some companys making money with products running in Linux: Oracle, IBM, 
etc... Why to blame Borland and not others?

You can get Kylix 3 "gratis" (as a beer) from the Borland site. This "gratis"  
Kylix version has a proprietary license with an unusual mandatory clause: 
every program you do with it must be GPL licensed, if distributed. Some 
libraries included (the runtime library and the basic CLX components) are not 
only free as a beer, but also GPL licensed. This is why we are able to 
distribute these libraries as rpm and deb packages for people that want to 
use our programs, but do not want to install the whole compiler and IDE. See 
http://kylixlibs.sourceforge.net

Kylix is based on Qt, this is the basic witget toolkit for every Kylix 
program. Kylix libraries include a Borland modified Qt library. Also GPL'd, 
of course.

Kylix programs can use a heavily evolved Pascal dialect supporting OOP, and  
many extensions to the ancient language. Free Pascal also supports OOP and  
many extensions. Pascal is not dead, as you can see: it is growing, spreading  
and  evolving with enough good health. And you can use the same libraries and 
components (object code compatible) with the C++ compiler included with Kylix 
3.

I've made a unit in Pascal (plain good old Pascal) to use ALSA with Kylix and 
Free Pascal programs. It is a bit outdated now, but i promise you an update 
soon to be synchronized with latest ALSA library releases. In my site you 
will find some examples in plain old Pascal, and some programs (for Kylix  
only) using OOP for several MIDI applications. I'm not using Sourceforge yet, 
because my project is very new and nobody has asked me to share a repository, 
but my intention is to do so  as soon as needed. We will be not alone there. 
If you browse sf.net now, you will find 1076 projects using Delphi/Kylix, and 
some more using Pascal and Object Pascal.

And many thanks to Dave Phillips. He included my ALSA MIDI metronome (one of 
the sample applications) in his site "Sound & MIDI Software For Linux", 
although he don't remember what this program is ;-)

Regards,
Pedro

-- 
ALSA Library Bindings for Pascal
http://alsapas.alturl.com