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Delphi still exists and is actively developed

embarcadero.com

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Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#51

Post by badsectoracula »

last_responder wrote: post #37
minsight wrote: post #18

Embarcadero was acquired by the same jackasses that bought out a company where I used to work. The new owners had a bunch of attitude and kept crowing on about "their playbook". It turned out that the primary technology that they were buying us for was the one part of our product that we actually licensed from another vendor. I believe they spent millions and didn't get what they were looking for. They had an offshor…

So in your opinion, this should be avoided? Looking to try something new ( old ) and this got me excited but your comment has soured it a bit for me.

Yeah, if you want something like Delphi, try Lazarus instead which -for the most part- is basically an open source and cross platform Delphi clone[0], so you're not bound to the whims of a corporation that is often seen as where old proprietary software goes to die.

[0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#52

Post by KindOne »

martin_a wrote: post #30
KindOne wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't know.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#53

Post by giancarlostoro »

marticode wrote: post #50
giancarlostoro wrote: post #13

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…

They have a free community edition for individuals.

I tried it out and it wasn't exactly stable. Someone from Embarcadero that was mostly marketing reached out to me and I told them I had issues, they just tried to sell me a license instead of taking the time to get someone technical to talk to me. Not sure I want to buy a license from someone who doesn't invest more into ensuring their primary customer base gets the help they need. I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to build anything commercial under their free tier if I wanted to, so if I want to see if something would be worthwhile now I have to take a thousand dollar gamble as opposed to $30 a month with Visual Studio Pro, or even $120 with JetBrains.

Update: Looks like JetBrains is $149 per year, and moving forward after October 2022 it will be $173 per year.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#54

Post by cosmotic »

badsectoracula wrote: post #35
cosmotic wrote: post #24

I remember one of the great things about delphi was that it statically linked everything into the single .exe making it totally self contained. A Windows GUI program could be a couple hundred KB, no other DLLs required. C/C++ could do the same but you were stuck with nasty raw win32 calls and a lower level language.

FWIW C++ Builder could do the same and had access to VCL too. AFAIK (never tried it) you could mix Delphi and C++ in the same project if you wanted.

Over the years the minimum size of VCL apps increased. Last I checked (10 years ago maybe) it was like 1MB or more compared to 200KB or so in Delphi 3.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#55

Post by marcodiego »

The linked page may be a snapashot of what delphi became: the video autoplays; controls disappear spontaneously with no obvious way to bring them back; most of the initial time in the video is spent showing the welcome screen: you can now set the background image and theme!; it has lots of text in the form of images, one of these says "Support for 4k+ Screens. Welcome to the future!"; the download button puts you in a page where you have to enter a lot of personal information and prove your are not a robot.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#56

Post by Tarucho »

jsmolka wrote: post #8
vbezhenar wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple low-level language, high-quality IDE. Why not.

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.

In the 90´s, early 00s, when it was used for troyans and malware a lot.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#57

Post by badsectoracula »

cosmotic wrote: post #54
badsectoracula wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW C++ Builder could do the same and had access to VCL too. AFAIK (never tried it) you could mix Delphi and C++ in the same project if you wanted.

Over the years the minimum size of VCL apps increased. Last I checked (10 years ago maybe) it was like 1MB or more compared to 200KB or so in Delphi 3.

Almost certainly is the extended RTTI information - VCL is huge after all and relies heavily on RTTI. The forms, objects, etc you are editing in the form designer are not just stand-ins like in, e.g. Glade, wxFormBuilder, QtDesigner or similar tools, they are live instances of the actual objects that are serialized on disk whenever you save the project with the serialized data becoming part of the program's resources and are deserialized when the program starts (VCL/Delphi calls this "object streaming"). This means that the full RTTI information needed to serialize and deserialize the objects (and any other object) needs to be part of the executable.

At some point they extended the RTTI information so that you can also make dynamic calls to methods, obtain fields, etc so the RTTI data became larger.

Lazarus adds a ton more data to the executables so where you'd get a 1MB in some recent Delphi, you'd probably get something like a 5MB executable with Lazarus (without debugging information - that'd make it much larger) on Windows. On Linux it can be even larger, e.g. the simple calculator shown here[0] (up left window) is ~2.88MB, stripped.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/MkfN4pO.png

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#58

Post by unixhero »

Both Embarcadero.com and Lazarus project homepage refers to that they have the capability of RAD.

Lazarus - "RAD - Rapid Application Development." Embarcadero - "RAD Server - Reduces the complexities of rapidly building and deploying a multi-tier turn-key enterprise REST API application server with Swagger support."

What does RAD refer to? What is it actually?

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#60

Post by panki27 »

One of the best aspects of Delphi is how quickly you can whip together simple GUI applications. The main issue nowadays is finding helpful resources on the internet, as hardly anybody writes Delphi anymore.

For the interested, a free Delphi IDE exists (comes with FreePascal compiler): https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

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