The Lazarus IDE is a stable and feature rich visual programming environment for the FreePascal Compiler. It supports the creation of self-standing graphical and console applications and runs on Linux, FreeBSD, MacOSX and Windows.

Lazarus is the class libraries for Free Pascal that emulate Delphi. Free Pascal is a GPL´ed compiler that runs on Linux, Win32, OS/2, 68K and more. Free Pascal is designed to be able to understand and compile Delphi syntax, which is of course OOP.

Lazarus is the part of the missing puzzle that will allow you to develop Delphi like programs in all of the above platforms. Unlike Java which strives to be a write once run anywhere, Lazarus and Free Pascal strives for write once compile anywhere. Since the exact same compiler is available on all of the above platforms it means you don´t need to do any recoding to produce identical products for different platforms.