Differences between Lazarus and Delphi Components

As we have seen, Lazarus is very similar to Delphi, but it must be noted that Lazarus is not a clone of Delphi and that it is not 100 percent compatible with projects created using Delphi. One example of this is that Delphi component packages cannot be installed directly into the Lazarus IDE. Before converting a Delphi project to Lazarus, we need to be aware of some of the differences of the environments.

The Delphi VCL and the Lazarus LCL are both designed with component hierarchies for rapid application development, but they are not identical. The VCL provides non-visual components, such as TDataSet and TQuery, while the LCL provides only visual components. Classes such as those that provide access to databases are part of the FCL. The FCL is part of Free Pascal and contains only non-visual components and units, such as classes, which contain implementation of such Delphi classes as TStream and TStringList. Other units included in the FCL...