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Delphi still exists and is actively developed

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Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#91

Post by zozbot234 »

hengheng wrote: post #70
panki27 wrote: post #60

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/

Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? Something that lets me draw a window with two number fields and a button that says "return sum", but it's two minutes of work and self-explanatory.

> Something that lets me draw a window with two number fields and a button that says "return sum", but it's two minutes of work and self-explanatory.

Tcl/Tk would be the most straightforward choice. Even easier than Lazarus. It's not really a native look, but practically nothing is truly native these days.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#93

Post by nottorp »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #9

For me when Borland became Embarcadero, it seemed like it lost it’s scrappy hacker ethos. Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Delphi, C++ Builder were all very innovative products that catered to the individual developer. The Embarcadero rebrand seems like a turn towards Enterprise. For me now, JetBrains is the new Borland, a scrappy company with a strong focus on what individual developers need and consistently turning out excel…

JetBrains is subscription pricing now.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#94

Post by arghwhat »

jkaptur wrote: post #84
hengheng wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? Something that lets me draw a window with two number fields and a button that says "return sum", but it's two minutes of work and self-explanatory.

I get a little frustrated, because the web is AMAZING for this. Type this in anywhere. Anywhere! sum function sum() { result.innerText = parseFloat(foo.value) + parseFloat(bar.value); } That's full of "bad practices" but for the use case you're talking about, who cares?

Unfortunately, nobody codes web apps like that. If they did they web probably wouldn't be that bad.

Instead they whip out React and because native browser elements apparently are the devil they add tailwind/material design/bootstrap/whatever on top.

Once you do it that way, the web approach honestly ends up as complex or worse than many of the alternatives...

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#95

Post by badsectoracula »

kwanbix wrote: post #83
mhd wrote: post #15

...for the enterprise. Which is okay, there's plenty of mixed quality software for that sector. It's just that Delphi used to be a lot more oriented towards beginner to small-business developers. And note that this happened before the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs. If it was all about a reduced audience for desktop-based applications and then supporting that, I would understand it more. I haven't been follo…

I think they really screwed up after Delphi 7, when they did the horrible Delphi.NET. Also, they should have had some better pricing, something like: Personal use: Free. Commercial use: Free until you are making $x a year, like Unity I think, and then different prices. Note: I might remember wrong, as this was so long ago. I started with Delphi 1.0!

I think their original pricing scheme for the first 5 or 6 versions of Delphi was fine. The cheapest version was just $100, which even a student could buy by saving for a few weeks (get them hooked while young, etc :-P). The versions that added features focused on enterprises were more expensive but these wouldn't be needed by a lot of people (a lot of Delphi programmers were making small shareware utilities instead of big database applications).

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#96

Post by bloblaw »

badsectoracula wrote: post #57
cosmotic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can easily remove the RTTI info from your binary: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3975363/12458

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#97

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

the_only_law wrote: post #89
Joker_vD wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I've tried to pick up WPF but holy fatcats, what an explosion of XAML files in exchange for... pretty much nothing, really. It's a shame, really.

I would almost like XAML, if it wasn’t for styling. If it had some CSS like DSL, I’d use it more, but unfortunately overcrowding styles invokes nasty blobs of XML boilerplate often having to override stuff that doesn’t seem relevant to what you want to do.

Isn't wpf deprecated too? I wish there was an official way to make apps in windows...

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#98

Post by pjmlp »

VikingCoder wrote: post #92

Delphi was great, until C# and WinForms came along. Then there was honestly no reason for me to use Delphi again. All the other UI junk in Visual Studio is terrible in comparison, for me.

They still don't offer AOT compilation and low level coding as good as Delphi, even with the upcoming .NET 7 improvements.

Native AOT will only support command line applications, and shared libraries.

Pity that they decided to kill .NET Native.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#99

Post by innocentoldguy »

KindOne wrote: post #23
kerblang wrote: post #5

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

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

I never answer numbers I don’t recognize, but it is still annoying to get these types of calls, again and again, and again.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#100

Post by innocentoldguy »

KindOne wrote: post #88
ChildOfChaos wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you ever put in your real phone number anyway?

Some websites I have signed up require a real phone number so they send a verification code on account creation.

I use Google Voice for that. I don’t have it tied to my phone, so the only thing they can do is send me text messages that I only see when I’m expecting something.
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