Total Commander 64 bit is using... Lazarus and FPC
By A.Bouchez on 2011, Sunday December 4, 09:46 - Pascal Programing - Permalink
I'm a long-time registered user of Total Commander.
This tool is my daily file manager. I never use Windows Explorer, since Total Commander is just faster, more easy to use (especially with the keyboard), has a lot of plug-ins. I even created my own plug-ins to access some custom file formats, and navigate into them just like with any folder. And it includes a lot of well written commands for FTP access or file comparison, which made other tools (like WinMerge) unnecessary.
There is a new beta version of Total Commander available, which targets Windows 64 bit. I just thought: 'Whoo, this is a real-world Delphi XE2 64 application'. I downloaded and tried it. Worked as expected, and integrates seamlessly with Windows Seven (for the shell extensions). Then I took a look at the executable... and discovered it was not compiled with Delphi XE2... but with FPC !
The 32 bit version appears to be compiled with Delphi 2 - yes, this is an OLD version (the first 32 bit version) - but this is what the TC author himself states.
As a result, the 32 bit version executable is small and efficient. And, honestly, you can write a nice Unicode software without using generics and all the new Delphi features...
When looking at the 64 bit supplied version, it was obvious to me that even if the tool was behaving the same as the 32 bit version (fast and native user interface), the gears were not the same. It seems to have been compiled with the great Open Source Free Pascal Compiler - using not the VCL, but the cross-platform Lazarus project. I do not know if the LCL components where used, or some Total Commander-custom components (which I think is more than probable, knowing Ghisler's skill and hand-tuning abilities).
It is even clear if you look at the application history:
14.07.10 Added: Start work on conversion to Lazarus/Free Pascal in preparation for 64-bit versionAs I wrote some time ago in this blog, FPC team published a 64 bit compiler using the Delphi/object pascal language in 2006. Whereas the "official" Win64 support just appeared this year, with Delphi XE2.
Christian Ghisler is working with FPC for a lot of time for the PocketPC (... and now Android!) freeware versions of his tool.
I'm very happy to see such a world-wide spread application using FPC and Lazarus tandem. There are open source alternatives to FireMonkey and Delphi XE2. Not a feature-like, but with another architecture, another rendering, another coding spirit, another cross-platform abilities, another mind openness... Even Delphi is using FPC as compiler when targeting iOS.
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