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22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

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Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#121

Post by mike_hearn »

StevePerkins wrote: post #37
interfixus wrote: post #22

A shocking aspect of Delphi 1 was the gargantuan executables it insisted on producing. There was much forum posting and gnashing of teeth. Hello World ran to about 100 kB. Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?

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

That's not quite true. Check out these Avian examples:

https://readytalk.github.io/avian/

Fully statically linked Java cross-platform GUI app (using SWT) in a 1mb download.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#122

Post by mike_hearn »

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?

Well, buy IntelliJ Ultimate edition and you can go ahead and create apps like you would have done with Delphi. It has good tools for database access, rapid iteration, you can design Swing GUIs with a built in GUI designer tool, etc.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#123

Post by bigtunacan »

I never used Delphi, but I have a couple of friends that were die hard Delphi fanatics. Eventually they moved on to C# as all of the Delphi jobs dried up with Delphi's continually decreasing use. They still swore how they thought it was the best thing they ever worked with, but at the end of the day you have to pay the bills.

Maybe it really is great, I don't know. I was a bit surprised looking at Tiobe (http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/) that they rank it as the 9th most popular language right now. Where is this actually being used? And the price tag is incredible!

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#124

Post by 16bytes »

SyneRyder wrote: post #77
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…

It shouldn't ever take that much. This is an example of what a 64kB executable could accomplish in 2016: Darkness Lay Your Eyes Upon Me - Conspiracy - Revision 2016 64k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SEGm2lUSY0 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106 After watching a few 64k demoscene demos, a 380MB Electron-based minimalist text editor just seems horribly bloated. (I'm currently writing a cross-platform Windows/…

The demoscene relies heavily on procedural generation to cram a lot into a little tiny executable.

GUI toolkits aren't comparable in this regard.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#125

Post by tvmalsv »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #66
riledhel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is correct. My "apps" are really just small utilities, and the compile times are about 1s or a little less on my older i7 with spinning rust.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#126

Post by sigzero »

SyneRyder wrote: post #77
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…

It shouldn't ever take that much. This is an example of what a 64kB executable could accomplish in 2016: Darkness Lay Your Eyes Upon Me - Conspiracy - Revision 2016 64k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SEGm2lUSY0 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106 After watching a few 64k demoscene demos, a 380MB Electron-based minimalist text editor just seems horribly bloated. (I'm currently writing a cross-platform Windows/…

How do you like Xojo? I've toyed with the idea of giving it a whirl.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#127

Post by pboschmann »

nunobrito wrote: post #47
pboschmann wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes, I absolutely loved the tinkering with Delphi and Kylix before I was a professional programmer. I remember Borland distributed Delphi6 for free for personal use and I had a lot of fun with it. In the end I landed a job as a web developer, worked in PSPad and left Delphi forgotten until the day — a decade or so later after I used Delphi the last time — I opened Eclipse the first time in my life. Never hated a t…

Yep. I don't use Eclipse for these same reasons. It really seems someone hates IDE and we arrived on hell for paying back something we did in a past life. I switched to Netbeans. Slightly better: bigger icons, better looking UI. I like the key combinations there. Still nowhere good compared to Delphi IDE with useful code snippets built-in and easy-to-use creation of UI apps.

Netbeans is indeed better. Used it on some mid-size PHP projects and liked its neat UI and responsiveness. Nowadays I'm a happy IntelliJ user, but hope Netbeans will stay alive. It's definitely one of the better tools around and deserves a place under the shiny sun.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#128

Post by pjmlp »

agentgt wrote: post #98
pjmlp wrote: post #87

Delphi was a great environment, but Anders and other key persons leaving Borland, while the company lost track which customers they should target, besides the "clever" idea to change the company's name, killed it. I know of a few companies in Germany and Netherlands that still use it, but it is hard to get offers. And we had to wait 15 years until .NET started to offer a compilation model similar to Delphi (only for…

> While Java kind of outsourced it to third party JDK vendors due to Sun's attitude against AOT compilation, oh well at least Java 9 will bring the first steps towards support it. I'm just curious. How would AOT improve Java's ability to have better RAD. I guess I'm just missing the association. Is it bundling/distribution? Startup time? Integration with native libraries? I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn'…

Java has worse RAD support than Delphi, yet Delphi AOT compiles to native code.

AOT compiling to native code, as standard option, would have improved Java's acceptance as safe language for desktop applications, due to better bundling, distribution and startup time.

To the point that even Oracle does reckonize this, and is delivering an initial way of partially AOT compiling on GNU/Linux x64, with support for other platforms planned for Java 10.

> I would imagine hot code swap probably doesn't work with AOT (aka JRebel) so that would hurt RAD.

Sure it does, that can be done with dynamic libraries. Many game engines make use of this approach.

Other environments like Eiffel and Lisp, have a set of JIT/AOT compilers, JIT during development and AOT for deployment.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#129

Post by pmarreck »

alex_duf wrote: post #91

I remember using Delphi 2 when I was younger, that's how I learned programming. If you don't mind hearing my personal story, keep reading, otherwise move on to another comment. By an interesting coincidence I was given a CD with tons of software on it, including Delphi 2. I started playing with it and quickly realised I could create my own programs using that tool. Later I went to the book store and found a book abou…

Nice!

For me it was Microsoft BASIC on the early Macintosh and this magical book from 1985: https://smile.amazon.com/Macintosh-Midnight-Madness-Utilitie... (Wow, I can't find the actual cover art anywhere! It was much cooler than what's shown there.)

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#130

Post by codewritinfool »

As a pascal user since the early 80's, then an Object Pascal user, then a Delphi user since the first version, I love Delphi but to be honest I cannot afford the yearly updates.

For someone that uses it for home projects, $916 for an upgrade is out of the question.

Rambling here, but... Delphi 3/5/7 were incredible design packages. I feel they lost focus when they jumped on the .NET bandwagon - maybe it is just my perception, but maybe some of their internal developers were less focused on native code. Anders leaving was also a big hit. Kylix was yet another distraction.

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