31–40 of 64 posts
Delphi was my first introduction to programming with Borland Delphi 3 on a magazine coverdisc before we had the internet. At 12 years old and just getting into computers, I considered .exe applications with their lovely grey components to be so professional and unattainable that the ability to build my own was mind-blowing. A few years later, I had some of my freeware that I'd built in Delphi featured on that same ma…
Dabbled in UIs after: GTK, .NET, etc. All disappointing and awkward. Do web dev for internal tooling when I have to, but I don't enjoy it. I do backends but mostly stick to lower-level systems stuff after falling in love with K&R and Unix early in college. Well, and firefighting prod performance problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as people like to shit on electron, I rather have an electron app than no app when it comes to cross-platform compatibility and features. The reason why Electron is so successful is because the other UI frameworks simply don't solve the problems people have as elegantly. Doing "custom" UI elements is super easy with CSS and there are many many developers for that, while doing so with WPF or QT requires far mo…
People don't shit on electron in general, some tech people do. We know what our computers can do when optimally programmed and there they are wasting cycles on rendering badly built web apps. I believe we should be shitting on badly written apps: we can see how a really well written very complex electron app like vscode behaves: then we install some simple crappy app that is not even in the same universe complexity w…
yes, very much worse than the average Qt app in my experience in terms of responsivity, load time and general UI performance
Reading this is a strange roller coaster of emotions. Happy to read about good old times, angry about the turn of event, and sadden about the current state. At the time I thought Delphi was ( and may be still is ) the Best-in-class and a target to beat for all other RAD and IDE. The future is going to be so much better for Desktop App development. Instead we have descended to Desktop Apps with Electron.
Delphi is still wildly popular especially outside of the English speaking software development world. It's a bit strange to see. The English speaking developers outside of the US are likely to be following US industry trends, but Delphi and other languages are quite entrenched in industrial programming and custom ORM designs in South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Something really nice about Delphi is it compil…
Reading this is a strange roller coaster of emotions. Happy to read about good old times, angry about the turn of event, and sadden about the current state. At the time I thought Delphi was ( and may be still is ) the Best-in-class and a target to beat for all other RAD and IDE. The future is going to be so much better for Desktop App development. Instead we have descended to Desktop Apps with Electron.
Delphi is still wildly popular especially outside of the English speaking software development world. It's a bit strange to see. The English speaking developers outside of the US are likely to be following US industry trends, but Delphi and other languages are quite entrenched in industrial programming and custom ORM designs in South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Something really nice about Delphi is it compil…
I tried to get into it a few years back and in terms of language features it felt like things had stagnated for a decade or more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Delphi is still wildly popular especially outside of the English speaking software development world. It's a bit strange to see. The English speaking developers outside of the US are likely to be following US industry trends, but Delphi and other languages are quite entrenched in industrial programming and custom ORM designs in South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Something really nice about Delphi is it compil…
Indeed, here in Germany there is at least one Delphi conference, and additionally it tends to share some slots in .NET conferences.
As it turns out, their software suite is written in Delphi, which required me to read quite a lot about it, and use/write some custom tools to help me analyze the binaries in Ghidra.
An existing tool I have relied on is called IDR[0]. It relies on "knowledge bases" which are binary files generated by another project[1] from the same author to store information about all the types and classes provided by each version of Delphi. The source code of these two projects is pretty "funky" from a software engineering point of view, but quite enlightening from a research standpoint to understand how Delphi binaries are generated.
I can see from this thread that a lot of people are nostalgic about how easy/enjoyable it was to use. I now find the low-level analysis of this technology just as fun and interesting.
As a side note and to loop back to the reason of this whole endeavor, after many hours spent reversing the software of this manufacturer, I can attest that the rumors about the code quality are not just rumors :)
[0] https://github.com/crypto2011/IDR [1] https://github.com/crypto2011/KBBUILDER