During part 1 of our webinar last week there were a few questions about installing components and getting started. I made a short video and wanted to provide some details here.
- SynEdit is an optional library that provides syntax highlighting and proper indention behaviors if you want to allow users to edit Python code in your application. If you just want to interact with Python and Python libraries then you don’t need SynEdit. It is an open-source VCL only component set available via GetIt or on GitHub. Installing it via GetIt is the easiest.
- Python4Delphi is the library that provides the integration between Python and Delphi. It is effectively a bidirectional bridge that allows Delphi to execute Python code and call Python libraries and allows Python to call modules written in Delphi in otherwise interact with Delphi code, objects, interfaces, records, etc. For example, you could wrap the VCL from Python and use it to create an application GUI. The is a wiki page covering installation.
- Python provides libraries and interpreters. You will need the right version for the platform you are targeting (Win, macOS, Linux, etc.) and be sure the bitness (32 vs 64-bit) matches your program. You can install both 32 and 64-bit versions side by side on Windows. Python does provide an embeddable version that is a minimal install and you could easily include it with your program. For more information on using specific versions of Python see the P4D Wiki.
More Python4Delphi details.