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24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

blog.marcocantu.com

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

#91

Post by philpem »

int_19h wrote: post #59
dfox wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBitBtn ;) In fact in Windows 95 and everything after it simply looks totaly out of place and the Delphi documentation tried hard to dissuade people from using that and instead presented some idea of what MS's HIG say (notice that Delphi 2 does not use TBitBtn anywhere and tries to match W95 UI style very hard, even more than Office 95), obviously for a long time it didn't really work.

This even predated VCL and Delphi. Remember OWL in Borland Pascal? https://i.imgur.com/esNFWJB.png

I remember there being libraries and components for Delphi which allowed you to pull in BWCC.DLL to get that styling...!

I had to bring up a radio programming tool on a Win98 laptop not long ago ("because legacy kit that still works and is somehow still supported"). First thing I saw, a BWCC styled "Radio Controller Connected -- Please Log On" screen.

Once seen, never forgotten.

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

#92

Post by ivanhoe »

Svip wrote: post #67

For 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…

I started with Delphi3, worked a lot in Delphi4, and then the version 5 came, but in meantime the web became THE THING, and Delphi didn't really find a fit in that new world of open-source tools and web apps instead of monolith desktop apps. Which is a shame, as in 90s it was the best IDE, with one of the best and most useful help systems I ever used.

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

#93

Post by philpem »

I have so many fond memories of putting together quick apps with Delphi "back in the day". Every now and again I'd buy a copy of PC Plus magazine just because they had Delphi 1, 2 or 3 on the cover CD.

I really miss the RAD concept, and I'd love to find a modern tool which had that aspect of Delphi, though perhaps with C++ or Python as a backing language.

I know there's Lazarus (opensource Delphi), but it's C++Builder I miss... wxWidgets is close, but not quite the nice quickly-have-something-presentable environment I remember.

Throwing the cat among the pigeons... does anyone remember Kylix?

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

#94

Post by marcocantu »

Svip wrote: post #88
amenod wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the $1000 price tag is totally wrong. I would never pay that kind of money for an IDE unless it was _really_ better than anything else. But this means: - the language has huge community (so I'm not stuck with a dying language) - it allows me to do anything (huge extensibility) Unfortunately it is difficult to change the pricing model once you have existing clients. On one hand they are the only ones paying fo…

The pricing model is the main reason newer people are not getting into Delphi. This is why they tried to lure people with iOS and Android capabilities. But when there are alternatives that are free, why bother? Yes, Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library, because you cannot afford it, is always going to alienate some people. And it is alw…

"Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library"

That's not really the case. With Delphi Community edition you get support for 4 operating systems, VCL and FireMonkey, it only lacks access to Enterprise databases like Oracle and some of the multi-tier architectures. Community has a large percentage (80%+) of the features...

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

#95

Post by marcocantu »

gattilorenz wrote: post #90

Marco Cantu's (the author of this blog) books on Delphi are/were a great resource for learning the language. Btw, his website is under heavy load right now (probably the HN hug?), and this is the error I got: Error in page: /blog/2019-february-24-years-delphi.html Error Class: EListError Error Message: List index out of bounds (-1) Suggesting that the webserver is written in Delphi... that's dedication :)

Sorry, my blog has some issues keeping up with heavy load... I've restarted it and will be monitoring it. I should have imagined, my bad.

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

#96

Post by marcocantu »

dfox wrote: post #5

The article mentions that the binary size of the listbox example is significantly different. Well, we used to say that Delphi 1 is totally wasteful as the default empty project compiled into 39kB .exe, obviously full of bloat ;) Edit: 39kB was nothing even in the 1995. But there was other more significant issue: if you went for all the database and line of bussines suport libraries you ended up with application that…

Well notice that info is for application with DEBUG information, not release...

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

#97

Post by magicalhippo »

andrewstuart wrote: post #53

Has 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?

Yes the language has evolved, but due to backwards compatibility not much as been dropped.

New things include operator overloading of records (structs), compile-time generics and closures/anonymous functions.

Using them you can write code that looks quite different from old Turbo Pascal days.

As for why using it except legacy, yeah... tough question. Well if your target is a Win32-only GUI application, then I don't know much that beats the VCL in getting things done. But that's a narrow niche these days.

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

#98

Post by Svip »

marcocantu wrote: post #94
Svip wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pricing model is the main reason newer people are not getting into Delphi. This is why they tried to lure people with iOS and Android capabilities. But when there are alternatives that are free, why bother? Yes, Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library, because you cannot afford it, is always going to alienate some people. And it is alw…

"Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library" That's not really the case. With Delphi Community edition you get support for 4 operating systems, VCL and FireMonkey, it only lacks access to Enterprise databases like Oracle and some of the multi-tier architectures. Community has a large percentage (80%+) of the features...

You are correct, saying 'large portion of the library' was a mistake. But as I remember, you don't have access to the VCL source code with the Community Edition. The feature matrix says that this is 'limited in Community', whatever that means.

We wanted to do MongoDB connections, which comes with FireDAC. But that's only available in the Enterprise Edition. So we ended up rewriting TMongoWire[0] to fit our needs.

I am sure you can do most things in Delphi in the Community edition, but it's a little too late, unfortunately.

[0] https://github.com/stijnsanders/TMongoWire

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

#99

Post by antaviana »

systems wrote: post #6

Embarcadero 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 remember reading that a former Borland or Embacadero CEO said that he absolutely preferred having 99 $1M customers that 1M $99 customers.

I think that enterprise-first strategy has dried up any chances for a community to exist.

We use primarily use Delphi for productivity reasons and think that unless they change their go to market approach, chances of a community reappearing are low.

Perhaps after they have already completed milking enterprise customers, they try to switch to a model of $99/year subscription-only model with a single high quality IDE product and then a community suddenly reappears.

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

#100

Post by raphinou »

andrewwharton wrote: post #76
john_moscow wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of their target audience is stuck maintaining a legacy system developed decades ago and will happily pay the premium as long as it's cheaper than rewriting everything using a modern stack.

We're in the process of migrating off a 4+ million line Delphi application that basically runs the whole business, but it's a 10+ year project to "grind the monolith", so who knows when we'll actually be done. In the meantime, we don't have much choice but to keep paying the licensing costs...

Out of curiosity, have you evaluated a migration to lazarus?
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