Still am not a great fan of static languages, but (mostly) out of nostalgy I gave the newly released Lazarus a try (another one). I like the new Tangoish icons, the interface is pretty stable now – documentation still sucks big time though (I can remember how I used context sensitive help for everything in Delphi, it was a bliss) or at least getting to it (and the docs website has no search terrible search facilities).
What really annoys me is the dataset controls or the lack of. I just wanted to do a performance test with xml to sqlite db import/export and some lookups, but I just failed to install sqlite! The wiki is terrible and the sqlite4fpc site is major crap (I mean in late 2008 we have a static geocities page? wtf? where the hell is the wiki? Google code, Sourceforge anyone?). I don’t want to get into details, did everything twice (including reinstalling Lazarus with some pain in the back recompilation attempt), it broke badly, let it be enough (Edit: on the other hand, SQLitePass works out of the box).
I also tried installing the IDE onto current Ubuntu, and boy, the installation sucks (for out of the box debs) and is totally a waste with recompilation (which is rather common with Lazarus itself) – and no, I don’t care for GTK1 (yeah it’s butt ugly when stupid distros just forget to package a proper gtk-rc, but it’s okay for me), but rather package/module installs.
I do know about the “shady” CodeTyphoon project: somehow Delphi people doesn’t seem to understand the way how opensource projects and opensource technologies (should) work (you know, version tracking, forum, wikipedia, comments, unified coding style, generated/useful documentation etc. – I don’t say these criteria are never met, but still…)