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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

#201

Post by ziotom78 »

analognoise wrote: post #181

Shout-out to Lazarus/FreePascal. It is like all the best parts of Delphi 5-7, and it is open source, free, and you can make commercial applications in it! I have started using it in earnest and it is wonderful - and a company can never take it away from you; there's no "we're shifting focus..." announcements. No paid support for broken updates. I honestly can't recommend it enough.

I can confirm this. I have used it a couple of years ago for a GUI app I needed at work (1): Lazarus was a real time saver! When a colleague asked me if he could use my app under Windows, the porting process was 100% painless: all the code (~1000 lines of code) recompiled in an instant and the application worked like a charm.

(1) https://github.com/ziotom78/hpview/blob/master/README.md

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#202

Post by soundwave106 »

danarmak wrote: post #184
frik wrote: post #182

I started with QuickBasic/QBasic and Pascal. Though I went with VB4-6 instead of Delphi. It's sad that RAD isn't popular anymore. 1995 - 1999 was great with Win95 era, everything was so consistent, good documentation. Then Microsoft realised their "The Microsoft Network" lost against the open free WWW and then the announced dotNet (which took until 2003 for them to release v1) - that was the beginning of the end of t…

RAD with WinForms was alive and well for many years after in the .Net era.

Very true, even now. The professional market for WinForms is probably dead, though.

Yet ironically, I use Winforms in personal code way more today than any of Microsoft's other GUI technologies. Winforms is a great way to get a Windows app up extremely quickly that needed a simple GUI. There are plenty of ways to get a quick command line style app up, but I really don't know too many solutions that allow you to drag and drop functional GUIs as quickly as Winforms (other than VB and Delphi).

For a fully fledged app, Winforms makes no sense to me these days. But Microsoft specific syntax like WPF or UWP no longer makes that much sense to me either. Might as well spend the time on HTML+CSS+Javascript and get cross-platform support...

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#203

Post by TimJYoung »

aylons wrote: post #177
noir_lord wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I half agree with you. It surely shows the massive complexity of large software, for sure. On the other hand, the tool should help prevent these issues. Altium has visible exceptions and lots of memory leaks that are much easier to prevent or solve with modern development tools and languages. Also, C aged badly, but the tools (ecosystem seems to be the hip name nowadays) for C evolved, and in a smaller scale, even th…

Modern Delphi has a simple flag that you can set that will show you a log of every memory leak in your application when you shut it down, and there are 3rd party exception handling and profilers/analyzers that can be purchased for a few hundred dollars that will take care of finding/fixing AVs/performance bottlenecks. It's actually quite easy to create solid and reliable applications using Delphi if you follow solid software development practices.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#205

Post by johnsea »

jacmoe wrote: post #176
acqq wrote: post #16

> I'll start blogging on the Delphi language coming back to Linux tomorrow! To taste the cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development today: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ http://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=whyuse "Why use Lazarus? No dependencies! With Lazarus you can create programs which do not require any platform dependencies [1]. The result of it is the user of your program does not need to install…

Lazarus and Free Pascal has made me return to the wonderful world of RAD and Object Pascal. :) I was a Delphi addict in the 90's. After Borland screwed up Delphi - including the Kylix disaster - and since I am now a full time Linux user - Lazarus is the only option. I have been following the Lazarus / Free Pascal project for years, and I think now is a good time to pick it up. I wish that it had more traction, though…

No traction because it's a mess. No git, no markdown, no clear organization, dated look in almost everything. Very unuserfriedly to just 'hop in'. No money unfortunately and most (all?) devs do it in their sparetime. Splitted between different attempts, FreePascal, MSE, Oxygene, Smartpascal, Newpascal, maybe more?

Nevertheless, Lazarus and Free Pascal is very good and important work. Wish they would modernize to the 21 century though (but whatever works for them is fine - only it's difficult regarding the traction then).

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#206

Post by msbarnett »

segmondy wrote: post #73
jk4930 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first Hello World in Ada was 2.3 MB, but I'm sure it was the most safe and reliable Hello World in existence.

I have no idea what you did, but I find that hard to believe, and this is with GNAT. I have a hello.adb program, 99bytes, compiled 25k -rwxrwxr-x 1 seg seg 25352 Nov 2 01:26 hello -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 99 Nov 2 01:23 hello.adb -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 1409 Nov 2 01:26 hello.ali -rw-rw-r-- 1 seg seg 1576 Nov 2 01:26 hello.o

Older versions of GNAT used to statically link by default IIRC.

So you'd inevitably get some clueless complaints that Ada was so much bloat compared to C, based on comparing the size of a statically linked executable to a dynamically linked executable.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#207

Post by ptero »

coldtea wrote: post #148
ptero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...) and Delphi is showing its age Tk is the better than Delphi RAD tool?

The beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and I put IMOs liberally in my post). The OP mentioned GUI prototyping and I was viewing Tk in this context. For rapid prototyping, Tk is a better solution for me, by far.

It is a very simple, script language that allows creating dynamic GUIs on the fly. I can make a simple GUI and hang calls on buttons and menus with a few lines of text. No compiling. No library mismatches to deal with. Whiteboard sketch to a working prototype often takes less than an hour, almost never more than a day.

It is cross platform and text based, so we can email prototypes around for people to try it on their Windows, Linux and Mac machines, click on buttons and report what they want to change. It is text, and does not require installing software. This is a noticeable advantage in locked-down environments, where installing Tk once and running 10 scripts is much easier than installing 10 revs of software.

Due to the language simplicity we had people who said they have no idea about it (and no plans to learn it -- they just wanted a prototype) making and sending back mods within a few days of getting the prototype. This is great -- then we know that this is what they want.

Tk is long in the tooth and has many limitations, but for rapid GUI prototyping it is one of the most useful tools for me.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#208

Post by nomel »

coldtea wrote: post #148
ptero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...) and Delphi is showing its age Tk is the better than Delphi RAD tool?

I'm assuming this person hasn't actually used Delphi...or Python Tcl/Tk.

I can throw together a very nice looking GUI app in one sitting in Delphi, where laying out the elements and binding and defining events is absolutely trivial.

In Python, with Tcl/Tk, I don't. I use C#, qt, or even flask. Tcl/Tk is absolutely not appropriate for RAD GUI development, unless it's at some hello world level of complexity.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#209

Post by krylon »

I've mentioned it before, but I'll repeat it. ;-)

At work, I inherited maintenance of an in-house application a coworker that left the company wrote for our accounting department. In Delphi.

When people speak highly of Delphi, they always mention how great the IDE is. Personally, I am not a big fan of IDEs. I was not disappointed, but my mainly, what I do is read and edit the source code.

And I have to admit, that part was a pleasant surprise! I had never looked at or touched Pascal code before, but I was able to make a change to the source - and it worked, the very first time! - within a few days. And the majority of that time was spent figuring out how the code was structured[1] and what the accountants wanted me to do (they always talk to me as if I knew the first thing about accounting).

But after that, it was smooth sailing. It sure helped that my predecessor wrote very readable code, but it seems that ObjectPascal made it very easy to write it that way.

Or, more briefly: Happy Birthday!

[1] The application is about a 10 KLOC in total, which is not small in my book, but not "very large", either. Also, I was both a developer and a sysadmin and a helpdesk monkey, so the phone was ringing about every fifteen minutes.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#210

Post by TimJYoung »

nottorp wrote: post #84

I can't help but notice that all the article talks about is Delphi versions up to 6... which is where it started to go downhill. Are recent versions of Delphi actually usable? I haven't tried anything beyond 8, and from my (admittedly rusty) experience the best version was 6.

The latest Seattle and Berlin versions have pretty solid IDEs that start up very quickly and the runtime/VCL has seen a lot of improvements/fixes over the last few years.
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