Borland C++ Builder (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#51

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 7:26 AM UTC

zakki wrote: post #39

godot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For companies I think you're right; but a price tag of a few thousand dollars was a strong deterrent for students or hobbyists/learners to get into doing those development. I think the web was great for learners in the 90s/00s because no special tools were necessary. All you needed was Notepad and a browser. If you did some CGI/Perl or PHP you may also need a $5-$20/mo web host account, that's about it.

And todays students will shape the future. If something not relevant with student’s now, it will not relevant with student’s future. Finally that thing will be forgotten.

Most students don't have any issues getting pirated stuff on street bazaars, so price isn't really an impeding factor.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#52

Post by badsectoracula » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 10:38 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #50

badsectoracula wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of telltale signs for Delphi in older apps: one is the use of TBitBtn control which adds an image to the buttons, the other is the use of icons in menus. While both can be done via "raw" Win32 (or MFC), they are much more cumbersome whereas with Delphi it is done by simply picking an icon from the visual designer - especially for the button one since Windows does not have a control like that (it is…

That theme was optional and could be disabled.

Sure but many OWL apps didn't disable it.

Similar to how many Delphi applications could simply not use TBitBtn (its use isn't forced) but they did use it anyway.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#53

Post by tonyedgecombe » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 12:42 PM UTC

danjoredd wrote: post #29

zerr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have abandoned community editions - it is several years behind the pro edition, broken on high-DPI monitors, no code-completion/navigation. No plans to release a new version.

Doesn't sound like a winning strategy long-term. From other comments it sounds like they are focusing entirely on customers that are already locked in with them. Eventually though, those customers are either going to go out of business as all businesses eventually do, or they are going to have to move on to other tools eventually. If community edition is never updated, IDK how they can expect to grow or gain new cust…

>If community edition is never updated, IDK how they can expect to grow or gain new customers.

They don't. The business model is to milk existing customers for all they have got.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#54

Post by narag » Wed, Apr 19, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #48

narag wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a long time, so things might have changed... I doubt it anyway. What you write about sounds very much like you could solve easily changing the default behaviours. There was some "autoalign" property, or something similar, that you can disable. I won't install a demo to check, I'm afraid, but knowing that there's a solution could help?

The described issue exist in Lazarus so i think it'd be the same in Delphi and C++ Builder. There are tools for automatic alignment, Lazarus has both an align property (align to the parent's left, right, top or bottom edge or to the remaining area in the center, which is good enough for many layouts) and an anchor system (allowing to either "anchor" an control's edge in place so it gets resized with the parent or to…

The end result is that if you open a project and for some reason the controls get resized...

I used a graphical diff tool that showed both versions and allowed to revert unwanted changes with a couple of clicks. I think it was WinMerge. Also, I never opened the DFM designer unless I was going to make a change.

Top and Left need to be published properties, even for non-graphical components, so the designer can place them somewhere without covering one another. That's why they're declared so deep in the hierarchy.

The serialization code is one of the nicest parts of the framework. I was tasked once with translating an old and messy application. Translation tools, including the one by Borland, included in the enterprisey versions, were utter crap. I hacked the serialization code to extract the relevant strings into an Excel that we sent to the guy doing the translation and then use his output to create different DFM sets, all of them included in the exe, and selected when starting the application.

Actually everything about the IDE was great, there was a comprehensive API to make plugins ("experts") for the IDE, mostly undocumented, but Ray Lischner wrote a couple of great books about it and some nice guys created a set of useful utilities with source.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#55

Post by CRConrad » Fri, Apr 21, 2023, 6:14 AM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #47

CRConrad wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then it had to compete with "native tools". Did anyone see it as “not native” in its native environment, Windows? Weird. It was a straight continuation of Turbo Pascal and Borland C++, both as native as anything could be since DOS and Windows 3. I think you're just plain wrong there. I don't know anyone who saw Delphi and C++ Builder as “not native”.

There are a couple of telltale signs for Delphi in older apps: one is the use of TBitBtn control which adds an image to the buttons, the other is the use of icons in menus. While both can be done via "raw" Win32 (or MFC), they are much more cumbersome whereas with Delphi it is done by simply picking an icon from the visual designer - especially for the button one since Windows does not have a control like that (it is…

> There are a couple of telltale signs for Delphi in older apps: one is the use of TBitBtn control ...

Yeah, but those are signs of it being not Microsoft, not "not native". At least back in those days, "native" meant "compiled into an .EXE file that runs directly on the hardware" (as opposed to, say, bytecode that runs on a VM (that is an .EXE that runs the hardware)).

To me, it still does.