91–100 of 307 posts
As someone who maintains an unknown but very large(several MLOC) free Pascal code base, I must say that I can't see much reason in the Pascal hate. Sure, I would love to rewrite the whole thing in Lisp (which is the language that lets me keep my soul), but we are all in all still very happy with the current code base. A complete recompile is less than 20 minutes, and then about half that time is spent in guile for ma…
It has been that way since well before I started using Object Pascal.
Sadly, Embarcadero's chokehold on Delphi is what turned me off of it back then, and still does nowadays. You could argue FreePascal/Lazarus is an alternative, but it's really not the same.
While one can argue about the pricing structure, the problem for me was that how they act and communicate never felt in any way professional, at least up until I left Delphi completely, it might have changed.
Even today, more than a decade later, their website retains the same feeling of being built by the lowest bidder, seemingly without even hiring a translator/copy writer that has command of English.
All of which feels super strange when you peddle a product for thousands of dollars.
I have never seen anything better than Delphi and the VCL for building simple and easily deployed Windows apps, most everything fails on that second part. While it's a pity events took the turns they did, it's quite astonishing that MS and all their competitors never managed to find a way to easily and robustly deploy simple applications without the need for running an installer or using complicated runtimes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're looking for something more Deplhi-like, why don't you just use .NET? Mostly open source now, tons of 3rd party libraries and component packages available for it, just like Delphi in its glory days.
Because I want a UI that works on Windows and macOS out of the box. Plus I want it to have a tiny memory/CPU footprint and while .NET/WPF is better than the average Electron app I still notice a difference.
Does Delphi justify its cost? As far as I can tell, there are no free compilers - seems like a pretty high hurdle when most languages can be used for free.
> Does Delphi justify its cost? As far as I can tell, there are no free compilers - seems like a pretty high hurdle when most languages can be used for free. The bigger problem is that you are stuck with whatever features Embarcadero thinks are important. For example, Delphi didn't have a 64-bit version for an excruciatingly long time. How many companies using Delphi got run over by a competitor during that window? A…
I still compile a old project in Delphi 7 once every 3 months just to add 5 lines of code, and they pay me monthly for it. It's cheaper than porting the whole system to any other language. It is a project that I've built 8 years ago. Delphi was already a "strange think" on that time, it was declining fast. I think Java killed Delphi - "One codebase for all platforms, even your freezer will have Java!" - this was the…