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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

#211

Post by kol »

igivanov wrote: post #192

Hey Marco, I still have your Delphi 5 book :-) FWIIW, where I work, I started using Delphi 5 when it came out. As of now we have about a dozen D5 desktop applications all essential for the core business that are in active use and supported as necessary, running happily on Windows 10. I don't see why it won't continue like this for another 15 years... The bosses (who are non-programmers) don't really care that D5 is o…

> I am stuck with one critical and long discontinued grid component

Try to replace it with Virtual TreeView: http://www.jam-software.com/virtual-treeview/ https://github.com/Virtual-TreeView/Virtual-TreeView/

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#212

Post by coldtea »

pjmlp wrote: post #199
coldtea wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, only the ones that matter.

The ones that matter to me are perfectly capable of handling a -static flag and use other C runtimes.

Yes, but "to me" is hardly relevant in a general discussion, if 99% of devs will use either GCC or Clang. Except if we're talking about a niche domain.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#213

Post by jmiserez »

statictype wrote: post #180
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?

What went wrong that we end up with this? Shifting of priorities. I remember when people used to complain that Delphi executables were 'bloated' and large - 200KB was the minimum size? At that time the complaints didn't seem absurd when we were connecting via 36k dialups. Admittedly we have probably swung too much in the other direction.

The apps on my phone easily reach 100MiB each, how is that the other direction?

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#214

Post by coldtea »

ptero wrote: post #207
coldtea wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

>It is a very simple, script language that allows creating dynamic GUIs on the fly.

Very limited ones. And ones clients will have a shock when seeing. And still coding it all together.

With Delphi you can drag and drop great looking (and more full featured) prototypes in zero time.

It will be limited to Windows, though, I'll give you that.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#215

Post by JohnStrange »

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…

It's the same for almost all of the great programming environments of the 80s and 90s that still exist. Commercial CommonLisps are also super-expensive, so is Xojo (=Realbasic).

They should have license fees based on how much money the developer earns, but I guess it's too hard to calculate long-term revenue and to ensure that the developers don't cheat.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#216

Post by irfanka »

marcosdumay wrote: post #142
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…

> so I learned as much English as I could so I could understand that manual. :) I started learning English as a kid to understand what was happening on the MS BASIC programs I could get on my computer by the time.

Same thing here! I never would've learned English if it wasn't for GW BASIC and Windows 98 - certainly not in the crappy schools of the post-war Bosnia!

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#217

Post by Joeri »

criddell wrote: post #193
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…

Cross platform applications are going to be large, but if you aren't cross platform, you can create pretty small applications. Steve Gibson at grc.com has GUI utilities that are pretty small. For example, his DNS benchmarking tool is 165 kB.

I think that Steve writes those gui apps using nothing but assembly.

https://www.grc.com/smgassembly.htm

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#218

Post by kol »

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…

We used EurekaLog (https://www.eurekalog.com/) to get nice exceptions and stack traces, even for access violations :) Imagine that: you have a native app, but you also have stack traces like in C# and Java.

I loved to use Delphi in the early- and mid-2000s, but unfortunately Delphi jobs disappeared, and I had to switch to C# and Java development.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#219

Post by klipt »

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…

Microsoft poached some of the top Delphi designers for C#.

As the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em...

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#220

Post by debacle »

jmiserez wrote: post #213
statictype wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What went wrong that we end up with this? Shifting of priorities. I remember when people used to complain that Delphi executables were 'bloated' and large - 200KB was the minimum size? At that time the complaints didn't seem absurd when we were connecting via 36k dialups. Admittedly we have probably swung too much in the other direction.

The apps on my phone easily reach 100MiB each, how is that the other direction?

He's saying the focus switched from how small your package can be to not caring about install size.
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