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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

#101

Post by vintagedave »

ptero wrote: post #76
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?

IMO Pascal is a good, clean language and Borland was a top engineering shop that built Delphi as a rapid development tool that supported Windows . At the time there was nothing comparable for Windows development. There was a huge marked for Windows consumer applications and games (Linux was not a household name yet) and very little outside of clumsy Visual Studio to write them. I recall reading at WSJ at the time tha…

> no Linux targets?

Linux is coming in the next release - there will be a blog on that soon. It already has Mac, iOS, and Android on top of its Windows support.

Honestly, I do not believe that Python or Tcl/Tk count as "good" RAD cross-platform tools. Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to. We regularly have customers give feedback about their productivity with Delphi/C++Builder, versus Python, C#, etc, and they say they get apps completed and released twice as fast or often more. "5x" is quoted often in our marketing material, and that number is not marketing, it's based on numbers people tell us.

- David (one of the PMs at Embarcadero; I work with the blog author Marco.)

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#104

Post by problems »

metachris wrote: post #59
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?

The strong point of Electron is easy _cross-platform_ application development and packaging (spits out .exe, .app and Linux binary), with no further dependencies. Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it's a painful experience, one I don't want to repeat. Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.

> Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it's a painful experience, one I don't want to repeat.

Qt guy here... Windows and Linux are a breeze, pretty much dead simple as I thought they'd be, just run winqtdeploy, make installer out of resulting directory, copy other libraries, done. On Linux, just ship it and install dependencies on target or make a package appropriately.

OS X however is a nightmare if you need other libraries beyond Qt unless you know all the voodoo of install_name_tool. But maybe that's just my experience showing.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#105

Post by ealexhudson »

ptero wrote: post #76
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?

IMO Pascal is a good, clean language and Borland was a top engineering shop that built Delphi as a rapid development tool that supported Windows . At the time there was nothing comparable for Windows development. There was a huge marked for Windows consumer applications and games (Linux was not a household name yet) and very little outside of clumsy Visual Studio to write them. I recall reading at WSJ at the time tha…

They produced Kylix not that long ago - I had an original box set once upon a time. I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#106

Post by systems »

vintagedave wrote: post #95
bdavisx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or $0, if you use the Starter edition. It's free for hobbyists, students, startups etc, with the clause that if you start making over a certain amount of revenue you're asked to buy it.

but it seems and correct me if i am wrong you cannot use the starter edition to create an application that connects to a database

which in my opinion makes it useless, RAD tools are mostly used to create line of business applications

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#108

Post by problems »

wtbob wrote: post #94
metachris wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strong point of Electron is easy _cross-platform_ application development and packaging (spits out .exe, .app and Linux binary), with no further dependencies. Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? I can tell you it's a painful experience, one I don't want to repeat. Also HTML+CSS allows for extremely versatile styling and fine-grained control of appearance.

A weak point, though, is JavaScript — quite possibly the worst popular computer language in history. I honestly think I'd rather starve than write another line of JavaScript again. Even reading JavaScript diffs from other guys on my team is a horrible, terrible experience. It's just a sad, awful, miserable, verbose, broken language. As a compilation target from a better language, I suppose it's mostly acceptable. But…

The problem with it as a compilation target in my experience is that interacting with other libraries becomes challenging - the JS ecosystem is now huge, but if you want to use many of those libraries from a wrapping language, it's possible but might present many challenges.

Like Typescript definition files. Producing them on a massive libraries is near impossible for a single individual to undertake. I've seen some people try to process them from docstrings, but the result was really kludgey.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#109

Post by zubspace »

marvin wrote: post #72
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?

Windows Forms is still a completely decent option that gives you the same advantages.

I fully agree. I sometimes wonder, why so many people jump to fancy frameworks like WPF where you need to create the markup yourself. I can spit out interfaces for desktop apps in no time with good old winforms but struggle to write data-bindings, triggers and what not in other frameworks. And it even looks consistent and the tools are generally easy to adjust and extend.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#110

Post by yumaikas »

libx wrote: post #80
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…

You haven't heard about Red ( http://www.red-lang.org ), have you? With some Kb you can ship GUI executables for Windows, Android, OSX and Linux. (OSX and Linux soon). Try it and report back the amount of Kb (not Mb) used.

It doesn't make GUI's for OSX just yet, and I'll be interested to see if it stays that small once OSX and Linux support are added.

EDIT: The version on their download page doesn't make GUI's for OSX yet, but there seem to be other versions that do.

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