FreePascal

This weekend, I decided that for far too long now I've been avoiding thinking about a GUI for AHEM (Adam's Happy Electronic Morabaraba). I recently nailed the stupid backs that were causing the AHEM engine to segfault when compiled under Cygwin, and so I now have a single codebase which will compile cleanly for Linux and for Windows. Of course it's just command-line and therefore not much fun to play with, so it needs a GUI. In the back of my mind, I've been worrying away at some constraints:

• Same codebase must support Linux (at least KDE and Gnome) and Windows (and ideally MacOS X)
• Should ideally have a nice, fluffy IDE and debugger to simplify the graphics stuff
• Must easily be able to consume DLLs/SOs (so that the existing AHEM engine can be built into a library and used without changes to the engine)
• Must not impose significant software dependencies (this is what ruled out .NET/Mono) which complicate installation
• For preference, should not require me to learn (yet another) programming language
• Should be reasonably stable and well-documented

To be honest, I have made a number of false starts, using Visual Studio.NET, Kylix/Delphi, KDevelop and various others - but always one of these constraints would bring me up short. And it's annoying, because the AHEM v0.4 engine is so much better than the old .NET 0.1 version, but I have to keep that one up for download as it's the only one with a usable GUI. Sigh.