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22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#61

Post by bdavisx »

ahacker15 wrote: post #23

Delphi is still popular in the south of Brazil. It's dying, but slowly. There's a lot a legacy application written in Delphi here. Some old programmers, that only know to program in Delphi, may even build new apps with it. It may not be that modern today, but there's the "pay the bills" mindset. I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue…

Just so no one else has to try to find the price (you have to search for it a little). The cheapest new user price for Delphi is USD $1,405.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#62

Post by mberger »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #41
StevePerkins wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large. You can use Electron (and basically bundle Chrome), or JavaFX (and bundle a Java runtime), and they're about the same size. But even if you ship all of the Qt dynamic libs, or all of the GTK dependencies, or even wxWidgets... it's still a far cry from "light". It just takes tens of megs to make a windo…

> There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large If you compiled a Delphi program without using the UI stuff the resulting .exe files were usually only a few dozen kb in size. People used this fact in combination with using raw Win32 API in order to create very small sized UI apps with no external dependencies. There were tons of tutorials on how to…

You're right, but the key point (at least for me) is the cross platform. We recently had a client send us their environment setup. Everything ran on AIX except for our stuff. That means they had to specially buy windows server licences just for our product. feelsbadman.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#63

Post by rubber_duck »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #43

Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?

Web has a good deployment/discover-ability/accessibility story, Node/Electron/Cordova are just there to reuse the work you already did.

It's not technically superior but it's economically superior since you usually get maximum reach with web and then minimize cost with the hybrid approach.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#64

Post by zhte415 »

nnq wrote: post #32

Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why? Has there ever stopped being a need for this?

Half in jest and half seriousness... Excel fill this void for many many things corporate. Two decades later it is almost as good as Delphi was, just no .exe.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#65

Post by tonyedgecombe »

noir_lord wrote: post #18
aylons wrote: post #15

One of the first environments I ever programmed was Delphi. Had lots of fun with it, and it had a special place in my heart... Fast forward 20 years, and I'm a hardware developer using Altium a lot. As some here may be aware, Altium is a multi-gigabit piece of CAD/EDA behemoth written - and still maintained - in Delphi. 3D, DirectX, everything in Delphi. Just yesterday and today I had easily reproducible BSODs by usi…

I don't think that really says anything about Delphi and everything about the massive complexity of large software. I get regular crashes with a bunch of stuff (everything from Thunar (don't think that shows C has aged badly), Chrome (C++) and Intellij (Java).

Some languages make it harder than others, there is a whole class of bugs that just disappear when you have garbage collection for instance.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#66

Post by yoodenvranx »

riledhel wrote: post #48
yoodenvranx wrote: post #43

Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?

And compile times were pretty fast too

I really want to see Delphi compile times on a modern i7 and a fast SSD. For small-ish projects that should be pretty much instantaneously.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#68

Post by tonyedgecombe »

nnq wrote: post #32

Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why? Has there ever stopped being a need for this?

xojo (formerly Real Basic), I haven't used it but they were positioning themselves as the VB6 replacement for a long time.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#69

Post by Havoc »

zhte415 wrote: post #64
nnq wrote: post #32

Was wondering... is there any modern all-in-one RAD-tool nowadays? And if not... why? Has there ever stopped being a need for this?

Half in jest and half seriousness... Excel fill this void for many many things corporate. Two decades later it is almost as good as Delphi was, just no .exe.

Mind elaborating on this?

I used Delphi for years, now I'm working in Excel all day and I can't quite see the parallel you're describing?

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#70

Post by Havoc »

melling wrote: post #10

"Fastest compiler -- 85,000 lines per minute" What do you get 22 years later on an Intel i7?

No idea but it was always stupidly fast.

First time I used a C++ compiler I thought it had frozen because the hello world took so long to compile. The notion that something could compile for longer than a split second (for trivial things) didn't occur to me.

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