24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today • Hacker News Board

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#31

Post by rpeden » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 3:40 AM UTC

mises wrote: post #28

What's today's equivalent? Something that can produce native binaries for at least windows, mac, linux? The one I see pushed a lot is electron, and there are some cool ideas, but nothing stable that I know of.

Qt and Lazarus are fairly equivalent to Delphi and can generate binaries for all of the platforms you mentioned.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#32

Post by haolez » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 3:43 AM UTC

rpeden wrote: post #31

mises wrote: post #28

What's today's equivalent? Something that can produce native binaries for at least windows, mac, linux? The one I see pushed a lot is electron, and there are some cool ideas, but nothing stable that I know of.

Qt and Lazarus are fairly equivalent to Delphi and can generate binaries for all of the platforms you mentioned.

Qt Creator is not on par with Delphi’s IDE, although I would Qt on new projects.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#33

Post by markbnj » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 3:52 AM UTC

I'm amazed about once every three years when I hear or read something that reminds me delphi is still around. For nostalgia's sake, here's a link to the pre-release review of Delphi 95 that I wrote for Dr. Dobb's back in the day: http://www.drdobbs.com/a-quick-look-at-borlands-delphi-95/18.... Doesn't seem like such a quick look now, but articles were longer back then :).

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#34

Post by mb_72 » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 4:25 AM UTC

I, like many others, loved and used Delphi a lot in the 90s, but for one major client we identified a major risk was the declining availability of Delphi developers (in Australia, at least), and I did a rewrite of the entire app into C#, splitting off the calculation part (it being a financial application) into a separate 'core' which is now re-usable across Windows, MacOS and web. At the time we did this it wasn't even clear if Delphi the product was going to survive. I'm glad it has, but the rewrite was the correct decision (yes, as risky as rewrites can be).

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#35

Post by richard_todd » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 4:32 AM UTC

It’s weird that the project options dialog still offers to work around the Pentium FDIV bug. Are any of the current compile targets still afflicted? Like, can 2019 Delphi still compile me a win95 pentium binary?

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#36

Post by m0zg » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 4:35 AM UTC

Delphi (and Borland C++ Builder) was a lot of fun back in the day. Linux ecosystem wasn't as mature, and people who insisted on on using the Microsoft toolchain had to deal with some insane bullshit like MFC, ATL/WTL, or bare Win32 API. In the meanwhile, people using Borland stuff were cranking out superior (and faster) apps out of components downloaded online, and using drag&drop. What would take weeks and a lot of head scratching in MFC was like 10 minutes in Delphi, and you _knew_ you got it right. It was RAD if you pardon my pun.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#37

Post by anotherevan » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 4:35 AM UTC

gumbi_nz wrote: post #25

Anyone remember Borland C++ Builder? I migrated away from Delphi to C++ Builder as soon as it came out. It still used DCUs tho from memory. Thems were the days

I still have a non-trivial internal company application written in BCB that requires the occasional bit of maintenance!

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#38

Post by anotherevan » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 4:39 AM UTC

sys_64738 wrote: post #17

Delphi was the Power Builder killer way back 20 years ago.

Bloody hell. I've developed with both of these. And Borland C++ Builder.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#39

Post by romwell » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 4:45 AM UTC

helloworld wrote: post #3

I forgot that Delphi was sort of a mash-up of Visual Basic and Pascal. Two great tastes, I guess. Are there contemporary products -- for building mobile and/or web apps -- that are similarly easy to use?

No, Delphi back in the day was like VS/C# now... or, rather, the other way around, given that MS snatched Delphi's lead dev* to make C#.

*Anders Hejlsberg -- who also worked to bring us TypeScript.

Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

#40

Post by anotherevan » Fri, Feb 15, 2019, 4:45 AM UTC

In 1997 I wrote an application for our state revenue office that helped their customers produce correct pay-roll annual adjustment forms. It was written in Delphi, had to run on Windows 3.1, 95 and NT, and distributed to around 19,000 customers and CPAs on 3.5" diskettes.

Delphi well fit the constraints of the time.