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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

#301

Post by jacmoe »

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…

Do you even know what RAD means?

20 years ago, RAD meant that you could drop visual components on a form, add some events, set some properties, and hit the green run button to compile and run it.

A very visual way of programming.

QtCreator with it's visual designer comes close, but then you have to suffer a more unforgiving syntax (C++), a complex macro compiler (MOC) and not at all easy cross-compilation / distribution.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#302

Post by jacmoe »

atombender wrote: post #295
vic20forever wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1994, I was looking at languages for a Windows GUI project, and I narrowed my options down to Borland ObjectVision (a sort-of "predecessor" to Delphi) and Visual Basic 3.0. I went with VB3 because the userbase was larger, but I've always wondered how my career would have played out if I'd chosen the other path.

You're probably thinking of Object Windows Library (OWL) [1], a C++ library that was available to both Turbo Pascal for Windows and Borland C++, and which was briefly available for other platforms, including several Unix variants. Borland also had the older Turbo Vision toolkit, but that was for MS-DOS. OWL was designed a very similar class hiearchy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Windows_Library

Please search before jumping to conclusions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ObjectVision

:)

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#303

Post by no_wizard »

Admittedly I haven't used Delphi but his reminds me of learning to program with realBASIC (Xojo).

The book with the IDE was free and easy enough to comprehend and it introduced all the basics of OOP.

Great times. I wonder if lots of people have had this same experience with VB .NET

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#304

Post by jug »

RodericDay wrote: post #257
alain_gilbert wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same story here ! For nostalgia's sake, may I ask what games/software you developed at the time ? On my end, I did: - Snake, and a Snake level editor, - Sokoban, and a Sokoban level editor, - an adventure game Zelda (NES) alike (but was not fun at all !) - Graphic calculator (to help me visualize the change of parameters quickly), - a software to visualize my grades compared to the rest of the group - I made a softwa…

This is one thing I really really liked about Go, but unfortunately I don't really like the rest of Go very much. What are other languages that have this property? Building an ".exe" I can send to a Windows user is not a pleasant exercise in Python.

On the topic of Delphi, try FreePascal / Lazarus? Free, dependency free development even with GUI designer. FreePascal (non-GUI) supports an ungodly number of platforms!

Otherwise, can't recall much else, discounting cheating with e.g py2exe.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#305

Post by jug »

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.

Also FreePascal does dependency free compiles to a crapload of platforms. Crazy! So crazy this could be a use case by itself.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#306

Post by wila »

boznz wrote: post #291
wila wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With delphi targeting macOS a GUI app starts at about 18MB. Not tiny, but certainly not too bad.

Ouch, thats pretty inefficient IMHO. I have a Windows database client written in Delphi XE2 that covers the whole MRP for a winery including built in reports and report writer that clocks in at 14MB http://rodyne.com/?page_id=375

That's because your Windows app is most likely VCL based and does not have a huge overhead on trying to built all of the GUI parts itself.

On macOS the GUI parts are in Firemonkey (FMX) and that is an abstraction layer that does all of the drawing of the controls by itself instead of using the native controls as supplied by the OS.

This creates some extra overhead. There's pro's and cons here. Personally I'd rather had they used native controls instead of FMX as that would look a lot better. But it is what it is.

From there the app doesn't grow as fast, so it is not all bad.

edit: Just looked at the GUI on my app [0] and without any resources it comes in at 16.2MB (so my estimate was a bit on the high end of things)

[0] http://www.vimalin.com

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#307

Post by matmo »

tazjin wrote: post #281
matmo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My current main work laptop (a pre-TouchBar generation MBP) can only barely run a "heavy" JS-application like Slack and something like IntelliJ at the same time. Is this hyperbole? I run both of these with IntelliJ memory settings maxed out on a MPB no problem. Granted, I have 16GB of memory, so understandably YMMV.

> Is this hyperbole? No. Just checked and this is an 8GB machine, running Slack with ~9 simultaneous networks (unfortunately lots of open source projects are moving to half-deserted Slack networks instead of IRC channels) can easily use more than half of that.

Ok yeah, I suppose I haven't really pushed Slack to that limit either. Only using a team or two myself.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#308

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#309

Post by jenkstom »

I too often see a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Delphi so great. Yes, you can drag and drop controls onto a form in a lot of tools. It can compile native code. And yes, Object Pascal was nice to read and maintain.

But the real issue is rapid database applications. Being able to create business apps very rapidly was always Delphi's thing. It was a really fantastic replacement for Paradox and brought Turbo Pascal and Paradox together to create something amazing.

For that there still isn't anything. There are a lot of things that are close, but nothing with the same level of power and speed. The closest thing I've found is Django. Hopefully that clarifies: it's not about GUI anything.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#310

Post by tluyben2 »

michielr wrote: post #186
tluyben2 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you try it? I try it every year (I was a Delphi fan and full time Delphi programmer from Delph-1 to 6) but it is not very good. The Pascal compiler is brilliant and fast but Lazarus itself is unusable every time I try. It often begins by failing to build the basic form until I go through a bunch of steps to fix the install. That's going to put most people off as Delphi never had that issue; it was install-and-go.…

I've been working with Lazarus on a daily basis for a while now (I work at a mostly Delphi company, but our server code runs on Linux so we write it in Lazarus). Can't say I have the same problems as you do. My host is a ubuntu machine, and I did install the latest version from their website, not from the package manager. This seemed to fix most of my issues with Lazarus.

I will retry again on Ubuntu. Maybe it's where I install from.
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