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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

#221

Post by ckok »

johnsea wrote: post #205
jacmoe wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Other than being Pascal based, Oxygene has no relation to freepascal or delphi.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#222

Post by rasjani »

FigBug wrote: post #156
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.

> Ever tried packaging a QT application for Mac, Windows and Linux? How long ago? I've never done Linux, but Mac it comes with a script that does everything and spits out a .dmg. On Windows it spits out everything into a folder you can zip up or create an installer.

Code signing seems to be broken in every release in macqtdeploy.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#223

Post by wila »

vintagedave wrote: post #101
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…

> 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, ve…

Server only though, without GUI support it is a lot less interesting to have linux support.

It is a nice start again though.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#224

Post by igivanov »

kol wrote: post #211
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/

I know about this one and others, thanks. The problem is TopGrid, it is further customized, so flexible and so entrenched in my code that it would be an enormous undertaking to replace it. Even if UI was perfectly separated from the business logic, which it isn't :-)

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#225

Post by kol »

bigtunacan wrote: post #123

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.…

It's used a lot since there are lots of legacy apps written in Delphi. You can't throw away hundreds of thousands or more lines of code just because Delphi "went out of fashion" (I know the situation is more complex than that, though).

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#226

Post by Joeri »

I learned VB3 at 13, and moved to delphi at 14. It was amazing. As easy as VB, but all the power of C++. I made my own DLL's to use in VB, just because I could. It was the coolest thing ever.

Fast forward years later, and plenty of intermediate languages (C, C++, Java, ...) I got hired into my first professional software developer job ... as a delphi developer in a company with a big multi-million line delphi codebase they wanted to migrate to the web. I had done some web development, so I ended up writing features on both the delphi and web teams, often the same feature. So I became intimately familiar with the trade-offs of delphi vs web development.

The thing about delphi: it was/is insanely productive. In the beginning it took about 3 to 5 times as long to write a comparable feature on the web side. It ended up driving me to research cutting edge web dev techniques to find some way to approach the productivity levels that delphi gave. In the end we almost got there, using rich frameworks and a component-driven UI. But to this day the delphi team can still get a feature done faster than the web team, and that's despite an IDE which is much weaker than webstorm/intellij. Object Pascal and the VCL are just that good.

However, I wouldn't do a new project in Delphi. You're locked into an ever more expensive product with an uncertain future, and the productivity advantages just aren't worth it anymore. You can get close enough using an open source dev stack, and the value of having all your tools be open and free is significant.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#227

Post by overgard »

Figs wrote: post #198
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 doesn't have to be so big. Modern GUI toolkits are just really bad about keeping their sizes down for some reason. I wrote my own personal GUI toolkit on top of OpenGL/GLFW for developing special purpose editors (for gamedev), and the resulting executables plus required shared libraries and resources (minus system libraries like libGL that shouldn't be distributed directly with the application) are only about a me…

Qt is borderline its own operating system. (I like Qt, but it does probably more than it should).

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#228

Post by Havoc »

hsitz wrote: post #194
Havoc wrote: post #71

It's good for teaching purposes because it forces a very structured clear line of thinking. Not convinced it's still best as a practical language though.

I don't think many ever thought the language itself was ever "the best". It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were designed, and the way things worked within the IDE, that many thought made Delphi the best. The Delphi/ObjectPascal language on its own, however, was pretty good.

>It was the way the libraries and visual components (together, the "VCL") were designed

Agreed. One thing that prevented me from loving python. The language was great...but how the fk do I get a clickable button without some mish-mash of half developed 3rd party libraries?

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#229

Post by kol »

hsitz wrote: post #195
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.

Back in early 2000's when I used it a lot, the word was that the even numbered versions of Delphi (2, 4, 6) were all poor efforts, and the odd numbered (3,5,7) were all good. I used 6 and didn't think it was bad, but 7 was better. Many Delphi users had remained at version 5.

6 and 7 were both great.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#230

Post by ptero »

coldtea wrote: post #214
ptero wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Clients having a shock after seeing a prototype says a lot about the author and very little about the language the code was written in.

Can you clarify "coding it all together" part. I have no idea what you meant.

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