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I remember, as a kid, looking up examples of malware. Bots and trojans and such. Invariably, much of it was in Delphi. Why was this so?
Not sure why, but when I worked for a large fintech a couple years ago, we regularly saw banking Trojans built in Delphi.
My main problem with delphi: it is "too proprietary". It was a very productive ide in the 90's or early 2000's but lost their path and never recovered.
Some new versions broke compatibility with previous version's components. There was the case where you paid a good amount of money on some proprietary components and they simply wouldn't work in the next version: you were imprisoned in an obsolete ide. By not being multi-platform (I hear it improved it lately) you could only use it with/for win32 so it lost servers, embedded and mobile. By not being open-source nobody could improve it.
Then it had to compete with "native tools". Whoever develops for windows wouldn't quit ms' tools to use it, whoever develops for mac wouldn't quit apple's tools to use it, whoever develops for android wouldn't quit google's tools to use it, whoever develops for linux was mostly ignored after kylix.
Note that I didn't even mentioned price and license.
They improved it later, I heard. But seems more like the old case of too little too late. Most successful programming languages today are open source and multi-platform. Delphi was dependent on win32 for too long and it still is "too proprietary". You do the world a favor by porting your project to lazarus.
I remember, as a kid, looking up examples of malware. Bots and trojans and such. Invariably, much of it was in Delphi. Why was this so?
The vega/buran strain of ransomware malware comes to mind as a well known example from the past few years [1]
[1] https://www.acronis.com/en-us/blog/posts/meet-buran-new-delp...
I have to repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28491963 : My main problem with delphi: it is "too proprietary". It was a very productive ide in the 90's or early 2000's but lost their path and never recovered. Some new versions broke compatibility with previous version's components. There was the case where you paid a good amount of money on some proprietary components and they simply wouldn't work in the next…
Give me a good cross platform GUI. Give me a good IDE for it. Don't make me learn yet another fucking programming language that exists nowhere else to use it.
The last part counts against this and also against Flutter, which forces you to learn Dart which is used nowhere but Flutter. What would have been wrong with Go or TypeScript? People already know those.
Most successful languages are open source for very clear reasons, but a cross platform IDE is something that could very well justify being commercial. It's an absolute ton of work and a constant moving target to support. So far no pure open source effort has managed to succeed unless you count the various HTML-based GUI systems that are indirectly subsidized by Google and Apple.
I'm working with the Delphi libraries every day in C++ Builder, bucause my company bet on Turbo C++ and Builder in the 90s, when Microsoft technologies seemed primitive compared to it. At a recent meetup in my country, 90% of Delphi developers were over 60 years old. Also, Embarcadero licenses aren't cheap.
I used Delphi years and years ago and it was great for building GUI applications quickly and easily. Much nicer than Visual Basic. I probably wouldn't recognize it now, other than I suppose it's still Object Pascal, which is a very good programming language, all things considered; straightforward, not too fancy, not too dumbed down. Free edition: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter
How dare you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calling RAD Studio a high-quality IDE seems like a stretch to me. I would choose VS Code or a JetBrains product any day of the week. Unfortunately you a kinda stuck with it when developing in Delphi.
Maybe RAD Studio isn't a high quality IDE but at least it is an IDE. VS Code isn't.
The closest i've seen elsewhere is QtCreator littering the code with red error messages about the unknown symbol while i'm typing the code together with a lightbulb next to the line with it which, if i click on, it adds the #include.
From a technical perspective the ability seems to be there, it just doesn't feel as smooth and seamless. Not to mention all these errors that appear while i'm typing make me anxious - like, STFU, i know the code is wrong, i'll fix it once i finish typing this part :-P.
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Be warned: You need to enter a valid phone number. They will call you asking on what you plan on building with the software. I've had that happen to me within a few days of downloading the software. Another person had the same experience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582890
Could you accidentally mistype the phone number or do you need it for something?
It does still exist, and I'd love to try it out, but I'm not throwing down thousands of dollars when it costs significantly less for me to get Visual Studio Pro as a single developer ($30 a month iirc) or you know... $120 for JetBrains IDE's annually (after 3 years) it makes no sense for me to throw down a thousand dollars (per year?) same with you Qt. I'm looking to evaluate your product and prototype and maybe buil…