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Delphi's 25th Birthday

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Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#81

Post by chadcmulligan »

magicalhippo wrote: post #74

At work our main product is all Delphi, some 300kLOC not counting the components and libraries (DevExpress, SecureBlackBox etc). There's been more and more talk about moving to something else, but a complete rewrite would likely be a death sentence so... Still, for whipping up some quick GUI that does file IO and/or DB stuff there's not much that beats it. Though having to consume REST APIs or similar newfangled thin…

Whats the problem with the REST Api's, I haven't tried it but thought it would just be a matter of dropping some TDataSources and so on?

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#82

Post by chadcmulligan »

sysrpl wrote: post #49
TsomArp wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see your point. Skype was done in Delphi, and it was pretty much end-user and very successful. There are many other apps: Skype, Nero Burning Rom, WinRAR, Partition Magic, Panda Titanium Antivirus, TuneUp Utilities, Aida64, BeyondCompare, Total Commander, CloneDVD, Ultra ISO, KMplayer, Gold Wave, Sound editor. And I am sure there are many others.

Here are a few more: fl studio, convert x to dvd, homesite, spybot search and destroy, resource hacker, innosetup, and originally mysql workbench

I think TOAD was written in Delphi to

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#83

Post by SnazzZG »

vintagedave wrote: post #53
bencoder wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to give it away. I learnt to program from a free magazine cover-disk Delphi, and its excellent help system.

We give it away now too :) There is a Community edition, where the license terms are basically that you should buy it only if you make significant revenue. Students, hobbyists, early stage startups etc - free. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

From reading the product-editions page, am I misunderstanding things or is the community version unable to even access a database?

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions

I can't see students not needing DB access let alone 'early stage startups', without TDataSet et al, it would be effectively useless/worthless. (we're STILL using D5 where I work)

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#84

Post by squarefoot »

sysrpl wrote: post #55
imagine99 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the advantages / pros of this vs. the free Delphi Community Edition? Seriously asking, as I've been out of the "Delphi sphere" too long and not really familiar with the latest developments but looking to get back into it.

The advantages? The compile works on must every CPU and platform, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Raspberry Pi, Gameboy Advanced, Amiga, and on and on. Also it's open source, so when you are writing code you can actually navigate to the underlying sources and step into everything with the debugger if you want. Finally, it comes with library support for so much more than Delphi, including Google APIs, FreeType, Cairo,…

"The compile works on must every CPU and platform"

Not just the compiler. If the board has enough juice one can run the entire IDE itself on it, therefore developing on the same iron. I've tried Lazarus on old H3 based NanoPIs and slowness aside (microSD, years old board, 1G RAM) it was perfectly usable to write, compile and run code on the same board. Not an ideal condition, still speaks a lot on why Open Source is great. I wish the IDE supported more languages and compilers though, and even a basic port of the LCL and debugger to them would be a huge achievement.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#85

Post by stockerta »

I programmed a lot 20 years ago as a hobby. I started at 13 with TP7 and some pascal books borrowed from my older brother. Later I "got" Delphi 1 and 3. Crated some smallish programs for myself, like a magic card db program when I started to play mtg. Fun times.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#86

Post by jawngee »

mhd wrote: post #25

Delphi was great for developing custom solutions for middle class companies. Not end-user stuff, but no enterprise either. That kind of software vanishing coincides with that whole business sector getting smaller. From a technical perspective, it was my favorite attempt to tame a often horrible mess of half-baked database design and ad-hoc solutions -- you can do spaghetti code in every language, but the Delphi apps…

I wrote two MIDI sequencers in Delphi and a couple of audio editors.

A lot of audio software and VST plugins, in the early days, was done in Delphi.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130121065235/http://www.sonics...

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#87

Post by magicalhippo »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #81
magicalhippo wrote: post #74

At work our main product is all Delphi, some 300kLOC not counting the components and libraries (DevExpress, SecureBlackBox etc). There's been more and more talk about moving to something else, but a complete rewrite would likely be a death sentence so... Still, for whipping up some quick GUI that does file IO and/or DB stuff there's not much that beats it. Though having to consume REST APIs or similar newfangled thin…

Whats the problem with the REST Api's, I haven't tried it but thought it would just be a matter of dropping some TDataSources and so on?

The built-in REST library is verbose and tedious, and it doesn't do HTTP pipelining which means any non-trival API over HTTPS will be slow as a dodo (though maybe they fixed this recently, haven't checked latest version).

In addition, the built-in JSON stuff is also tedious to use, I found SecureBlackBox's variant with some class helper to provide basic XPath-like access to be quite a lot more ergonomic to use. But JSON still feels like an impedance mismatch.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#88

Post by mobilio »

stockerta wrote: post #85

I programmed a lot 20 years ago as a hobby. I started at 13 with TP7 and some pascal books borrowed from my older brother. Later I "got" Delphi 1 and 3. Crated some smallish programs for myself, like a magic card db program when I started to play mtg. Fun times.

I start with TP 5.0 or 5.5.

Re: Delphi's 25th Birthday

#90

Post by kwertzzz »

skeletal88 wrote: post #69

One small language feature I liked about Delphi was class properties. I used Delphi at my first job, while studying in the university, where we were taught Java (and C and other languages), what I really disliked were Java's getters and setters, which seemed like a clunky and pointless verbosity, compared to the properties in Delphi. Python has the @property decorator, I wish other languages had something like that.…

This is exactly what I like too about Delpi (and Pascal if I remember correctly) compared to C++ and Java. Julia, which I use now, has a similar feature but properties are less extensively used there (except for interoperability with Python). But it is a great feature to reduce the clutter in your code.
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