Live data from Hacker News

Borland C++ Builder (2015)

runtimeterror.com

1–10 of 55 posts

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#3
Embarcadero is pretty much in the business of soaking customers locked into Borland's old products for as much as they're willing to pay, hence why the IDEs cost an arm and a leg while competitive products are relatively cheap or free.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#4
post #3

Embarcadero is pretty much in the business of soaking customers locked into Borland's old products for as much as they're willing to pay, hence why the IDEs cost an arm and a leg while competitive products are relatively cheap or free.

Meanwhile, the only real C++ RAD alternative to C++ Builder in 25 years was C++/CX, killed by internal WinDev politics.

And maybe by .NET 9, all the kinds of Delphi workloads will be finally supported by Native AOT and low level coding capabilities.

All enterprise products cost an arm and a leg, and at that level it hardly matters, license costs aren't where usually project budgets get burned.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#5
I used to work at a Delphi shop that switched to C++. Of course we used C++ Builder.

The component palette was identical to Delphi (and was still Object Pascal code). You could use Delphi UI components with it.

C++ support was a bit buggy in places, but not terrible. I had worse problems compiling C++ on AIX.

Delphi and C++ Builder were simply the best native UI creation tools I've ever used.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#6
Looks like C++ Builder is still available. Its way expensive and the licensing for community edition is very prohibitive...if you make more than 5k or you have more than 5 people on your team you need to pay up. And you practically need to sell a kidney to afford it. That sucks because this IDE looks really neat, but its def not worth the money in my opinion unless you are a larger company already

Community edition: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder/starter

Professional https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#7
I have to repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28491963 again:

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 heard it improved lately) you could only use it with/for win32 so it lost servers, embedded, cloud 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.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#8

I used to work at a Delphi shop that switched to C++. Of course we used C++ Builder. The component palette was identical to Delphi (and was still Object Pascal code). You could use Delphi UI components with it. C++ support was a bit buggy in places, but not terrible. I had worse problems compiling C++ on AIX. Delphi and C++ Builder were simply the best native UI creation tools I've ever used.

this whole borland/delphi approach is rather similar to how Visual Basic for Applications still works inside of Excel or Outlook, and is still used by big companies all over the world as i type this.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#9
Don't use delphi, the rad sucks for everything but dragging and dropping components. The drag and drop is also a pain in the ass because it will constantly adjust the layout, making every commit be filled with noise. Maybe all frontend is this bad though, I don't have much experience with other tools.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#10

I have to repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28491963 again: 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…

what I want is terminal based turbo-C++ ide with the plugin architecture of vscode and solid integration of code browsing. & yes I can do it with vim or emacs but I dont wanna.
Post reply on HN