I remember using Turbo Pascal, basically the predecessor of Delphi. I had tried Amiga Basic before, but this was the first time that I was being helped by a teacher and actually understanding what I was doing, rather than just copying scripts from Amiga Magazine line by line. I was in my first or second year of high school and, IIRC, we had PCs with 486 CPU (Pentium had already launched but it was very expensive). I remember one day a friend of mine came and told me that Intel was going to make a 1Ghz CPU, I didn't believe him. It would take a few more years before I tried the Internet for the first time.
24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
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Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#62Delphi (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…
And then Borland decided to change business forcing us to deal with MFC. That whole Inprise adventure was pretty bad.
And then Hejlsberg left for MS and took his toys with him. WinForms bore more than a passing resemblance to VCL, and C# more than a passing resemblance to Delphi/C++ Builder. Good for MS to recognize true talent when they see it.
Though their current API situation is still a mess: they can't stop screwing with it. But their .NET situation is as good as it's ever been.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#63Niklaus Wirth turns 85 today (Feb 15th). Happy Birthday!
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
140KB+ for that simple app even in 1995 would've been an insane level of bloat, considering that the Windows 3.1 Program Manager (PROGMAN.EXE) also shown in the screenshots is only 112KB, and it certainly has much more functionality. The File Manager, WINFILE.EXE, is 167KB. As an experienced native Win32 programmer, the same thing in pure Win32 would be What's even more disturbing is the fact that an app which does t…
300 Kb was basically the fixed-size overhead for any VCL app. But by late 90s, it was "good enough", and that's when Delphi was at peak popularity.
I may be misremembering but the early visual basics exported even heavier results.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#65is there something Delphi (I mean RAD IDE) for React? Sorry for stupid question.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#66Embarcadero tools and ides, are super expensive considering that most developer tools are either free (visual studio developer is free for individuals), or way cheaper (jetbrains) I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive Free-pascal i…
I find free-pascal to be an intellectually and technically interesting option. It's not new and shiny that's why it's not compelling to many people.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#67For almost 11 years now, I've been working professionally with Delphi. And it would be wrong to say it's been a smooth ride. There's nothing wrong - per say - with Object Pascal. Or rather, it's not worse than C++, but Delphi - i.e. the library and IDE - is what's lacking behind.
It was definitely cutting edge in the mid-90s, but it has not managed to keep with the times. Most Delphi developers rely on Indy, a third party library of various classes, that provide a lot of functionality the base library should have provided. And even Indy isn't that quick at picking up new features as the world moves on.
When Embarcadero took over from Borland around 2009, they clearly tried to move it on a direction that would encourage more developers. They created ways to build your Delphi application for iOS and Android, which was meant to get more people to write Delphi. It didn't, since the IDE still cost over $1,000 a year. I'd imagine the people who used that functionality were those who were already 'stuck' with Delphi.
Indeed, even as one who engages a lot in the Delphi community, mostly through necessity, notice that very few people join the community without having some legacy application to maintain. And the community as a whole is dwindling anyway.
Embarcadero should have focused on core aspects of the language, which they are finally getting around to. You can now declare variables in the middle of function? That's so 21st century! (Although the forward compiler can't figure it out, so you'll see a lot of red lines in your IDE if you do.)
I won't be writing Delphi professionally a lot longer, though. As I am taking a new job this March, where I am moving on to Go. So it's more a bittersweet good bye for me. Because Delphi is frustrating to work with on a daily basis, but there is a lot nice about it.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#68Has the Delphi language evolved - i.e. does it use new ideas and has it dropped old ones? Or is that language substantially the same? Also, why would anyone use Delphi today except for legacy maintenance?
There have been a few syntactic enhancements over the last 10 years or so. Generics for example. Recently they have also added inline variable declaration (you don't need to put all vars in a function at the top anymore). But these don't really matter to me so much. I think Emb did this as response to "Oh Delphi language is archaic - Java has this, C# has that ..."
I still use Delphi for new projects by default. Static linking of libraries into one distributable dll or exe makes it very appealing. If I wanted this in another IDE, I'd have to use VC++. Also, Delphi's VCL, a near comprehensive wrapper of Win32 (its true strength) and native support for IDLs like COM makes it easy to roll out working software sooner.
I'm currently writing a natively compiled Excel Addin with heavy use of TThread - a multithreading VCL class for the Windows platform. Lightning fast compile & build speeds will spoil you.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#69Delphi made me lots of applications and money. It was a great tool when it first came out.
Re: 24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today
#70I get the feeling that, just like cockroaches, Delphi will survive a nuclear apocalpyse...
As long as Win32 exists as a supported api from Microsoft, Delphi will survive in that shade. For a long time Borland produced better tooling for dev on Windows than Microsoft did. Eventually Microsoft just poached the best from Borland including Delphi's inventor, Anders Heijlsberg. Anders eventually created Microsoft J++ rebranded to C#. Many don't know this, but a lot of the event, evensinks and visual design architectures found in Delphi are implemented in C# and the .NET apis.