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Delphi still exists and is actively developed

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Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#241

Post by CRConrad »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #43
jollyllama wrote: post #2

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?

Most Delphi examples I see these days are actually modern, recently written malware samples. It statically compiles into a tiny binary which has a weird ABI which flies under the radar of AV software looking for programs up to no good. What's not to love for this purpose if you are an adversarial actor? The vega/buran strain of ransomware malware comes to mind as a well known example from the past few years [1] [1] h…

> Most Delphi examples I see these days are actually modern, recently written malware samples. It statically compiles into a tiny binary which has a weird ABI which flies under the radar of AV software looking for programs up to no good. What's not to love for this purpose if you are an adversarial actor?

And recently lots of malware detection has started looking for that "weird" ABI signature, so now everyone's anti-virus is throwing up alarms at perfectly legit age-old software just because it's built with Delphi.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#242

Post by CRConrad »

kaba0 wrote: post #140
unnouinceput wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean how you open Delphi IDE, create a new project (default is Windows VCL, but you can also do cross-platform FireMonkey just as easy), then when the main form is presented in IDE how you drop components from the components palette? As in same way you do it in Visual Studio when doing a WPF and or/ Winforms project as well? Or as in any visual IDE for any programming language, because they all follow the same id…

I guess? I was interested in whether it had some unique feature/paradigm, or was it loved for some other reason.

> I was interested in whether it had some unique feature/paradigm, or was it loved for some other reason.

It was so beloved because it actually worked exactly as the marketing slogan at the time claimed: "The power of C++ with the ease of Visual Basic". (Or was it the other way around?)

This was a time when Microsoft's "Visual" Studio IDE was anything but: It had no visual form builder, just a code editor. To actually put something on screen, you had to write reams of code straight out of a Charles Petzold tome. Visual Basic, OTOH, sure did have a nice easy graphical UI builder, but a pathetically weak ultra-high-level language -- in contrast to Object Pascal, which is every bit as high- or as low-level as C++.

I learned all three in an "Object Oriented Programming" course I took in 1995, IIRC in the order 1: OO concepts, 2: C++, 3: VB, 4: Delphi (or was it 2: VB, 3: C++?). After the two preceding, Delphi was a revelation and love at first sight.

That love soured slightly after the Kylix debacle, some more with diverse bugginess and drawn-out implementation of Windows developments (Unicode, 64-bit, High-DPI...), and finally petered out almost totally over the covert "feature moved to higher-priced more Enterprise-y edition" and overt price hikes over the years (decades) since, with the on-again off-again free (gratis) Community Edition shenanigans as perhaps the final nail in the coffin.

But Delphi versions 1 through 7 (1995 -- ca 2005-10) still has, and probably will for ever have, a special place in my heart as my most beloved programming tool. And fortunately, it has a worthy heir in Free Pascal / Lazarus.

HTH!

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#243

Post by CRConrad »

pipeline_peak wrote: post #153
pipeline_peak wrote: post #28

You know a modern company is active when there’s a photo of a black lady with natural hair holding a laptop by a server room.

Cont'd : Then you walk into the Delphi office and it's just a bunch of Nordic academic guys with grey hair.

My hair is still dark; it's just the beard that's mostly grey nowadays.

Signed,

Sid Dabster

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#244

Post by gduke »

runjake wrote: post #131
unnouinceput wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delphi IDE is available for Windows only, regardless of its version. I suspect @runjake meant is that the free version only targets Windows, while the architect edition of Delphi can target all of the major OS'es out there.

Yep, this is what I meant. Updated original comment, thanks.

The free Community Edition supports targeting Windows, Android, iOS and macOS. From a feature point of view, it is similar to what you get with the unrestricted Professional version. Enterprise and Architect also has the Linux compiler. On Windows you can use the tried and battle tested VCL framework, and for multi platform there's FireMonkey.

The IDE's are, however only runs on Windows (Or Wine if you're brave, YMMV).

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#245

Post by gduke »

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.

Delphi still exists and is available as a free Community Edition too.

There are plenty of resources and new books being written. You can find a collection at https://learndelphi.org

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#246

Post by gduke »

Joker_vD wrote: post #86
the_only_law wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? Maybe hard pressed to call it modern, but WinForms is still my go to for quickly making a UI, at least in Windows.

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.

Delphi's FireMonkey is in many ways similar to WPF in the way you can manipulate UI elements, except all the fluff and cruft WPF/XAML has. On the plus side, FireMonkey is multi platform too.

VCL is still the tried and tested UI framework for Windows only applications though, nothing beats its flexibility.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#247

Post by gduke »

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.

You can still mix C++Builder and Delphi today. Embarcadero made huge efforts to make sure their Clang powered compilers has interop with Delphi code and vice versa. C++Builder still share the VCL and FireMonkey frameworks with Delphi.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#248

Post by gduke »

sarsway wrote: post #105
yakubin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if anyone here has experience with both Delphi and SwiftUI. I'd be curious to know which one is more comfortable.

Well there's a reason all the WYSIWYG UI editors died out. They are a quick way to whip up a passable UI, but usually turns out to be quite ugly under the hood, hard to reuse, and a pain to maintain. Delphi is really from a different age, simpler times, when the common paradigm was having the app directly connected to some sort of SQL database, which serves as a stable, static data source for the UI. Making glorified…

I respectfully disagree with this.

Delphi still delivers unmatched productivity when it comes to designing UIs and writing maintainable multi platform software.

Delphi's FireMonkey framework has a lot of things right and you can create resusable forms easily, where you don't have to fight with a declarative UI (This paradigm is an anti-pattern and totally misplaced for UIs).

There are many multi platforms apps made with Delphi which are by no means "a glorified database editor" ;)

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#249

Post by gduke »

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.

Since Embarcacero was acquired in 2015 and until now, there has happened quite a bit to the RAD Studio IDE and underlying tech. I don't know about your situation, but, Delphi and C++Builder has not been left to rot.

Re: Delphi still exists and is actively developed

#250

Post by gduke »

kaiken1987 wrote: post #63

Delphi and it's components are still nice. But their C++Builder seems like if just keeps getting worse. Instead of maintaining the Borland compiler and debugger they've been replacing it with new ones that work about a quarter as well.

The move to Clang was to support C++11 and C++17 language features. The classic Borland compiler was stuck at C++03.

The debugger situation has slowly been improving but there is a unification of using LLDB for all platforms.

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