21–30 of 120 posts
the blog does not load to me, but is this really "Delphi 5"? As in Borland Delphi 5 "Argus" released in August 1999 which introduced XML support and ADO databases?
I feel like Delphi, along with maybe VB6 and WinForms, have been the pinnacle of easy UI development, and things have gone significantly downhill since then. Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.), often implicitly-configured to produce output, in head-space. And due to this dependency hell, when porting a p…
I feel like Delphi, along with maybe VB6 and WinForms, have been the pinnacle of easy UI development, and things have gone significantly downhill since then. Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.), often implicitly-configured to produce output, in head-space. And due to this dependency hell, when porting a p…
Including being high level, low level systems programming, and compiled ahead of time. It is incredible that given its heritage, we have had to wait 25 years for .NET to finally provide a similar experience, and there are still some rough edges. While it offered a way to perform AOT compilation, NGEN was only meant for fast startup and nothing else.
It's even the same person: Microsoft poached Anders Hejlsberg, creator of both Turbo Pascal and Delphi, to architect .net.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall some very nasty hacks and often-won't-work-at-all issues in trying to get Delphi 6 to run on Vista or Windows 7. Windows breaks backwards compatibility more often than "never".
I would be surprised if Delphi 5 ran without a hitch on Windows 10/11. On the other hand, I'd also be surprised if the code couldn't be ported as-is, with just some minor tweaks if any, to the latest Delphi release (released this month). The transition to Unicode strings was a breaking change that did have some impact, but if the code used string manipulation routines instead of direct byte manipulation it should wor…
I'd be surprised if it didn't. Not Delphi, but I've been helping a client update their Windows program, from a compiler which shipped in 1998. Their program, with that compiler, runs just fine on Windows 11.
The backward compatibility of the Win32 API is such that I regularly use programs last compiled 20 years or more ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be surprised if Delphi 5 ran without a hitch on Windows 10/11. On the other hand, I'd also be surprised if the code couldn't be ported as-is, with just some minor tweaks if any, to the latest Delphi release (released this month). The transition to Unicode strings was a breaking change that did have some impact, but if the code used string manipulation routines instead of direct byte manipulation it should wor…
>> I would be surprised if Delphi 5 ran without a hitch on Windows 10/11 I'd be surprised if it didn't. Not Delphi, but I've been helping a client update their Windows program, from a compiler which shipped in 1998. Their program, with that compiler, runs just fine on Windows 11. The backward compatibility of the Win32 API is such that I regularly use programs last compiled 20 years or more ago.
I suppose if you run it as admin and/or install it outside Program Files it'll make it a lot less troublesome.
So, not unexpected, but I'd still be mildly surprised.
I feel like Delphi, along with maybe VB6 and WinForms, have been the pinnacle of easy UI development, and things have gone significantly downhill since then. Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.), often implicitly-configured to produce output, in head-space. And due to this dependency hell, when porting a p…
For example, all layout was pixel based. Making windows resizable required much complex ad-hoc code, and internationalization was hard as well. Very early in my career, I have spent person months clicking through every single screen in a large desktop application to find words cut off due to words having different lengths (measured in pixel) in different languages. I knew what "Ok" and "Cancel" meant in half a dozen languages. At the time, Java was really breaking ground with container based layouts in Swing. Delphi and Visual Basic caught up only in the .NET era.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be surprised if Delphi 5 ran without a hitch on Windows 10/11. On the other hand, I'd also be surprised if the code couldn't be ported as-is, with just some minor tweaks if any, to the latest Delphi release (released this month). The transition to Unicode strings was a breaking change that did have some impact, but if the code used string manipulation routines instead of direct byte manipulation it should wor…
>> I would be surprised if Delphi 5 ran without a hitch on Windows 10/11 I'd be surprised if it didn't. Not Delphi, but I've been helping a client update their Windows program, from a compiler which shipped in 1998. Their program, with that compiler, runs just fine on Windows 11. The backward compatibility of the Win32 API is such that I regularly use programs last compiled 20 years or more ago.
The fall off occurs as you veer off into deeper holes:
- Multimedia software and games tend to hit on areas of Windows where compatibility is far from perfect.
- Even 32-bit software would sometimes have random Win16 binaries, and those are not emulated; I don't blame Microsoft or anything, but they could support it if they wanted to. (Understandably, they do not.)
- Software that uses truly obsolete Windows components may no longer work. AFAIK .NET Framework 1.1 hasn't been supported since Windows 8. Old ActiveX and COM components can also be a problem.
This has led to some situations where you might actually have better luck running the old software under Wine and Linux than modern Windows, especially for some older games.
It's not that Microsoft didn't do immense amounts of work here, but in practice there are some holes I've run into.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> I would be surprised if Delphi 5 ran without a hitch on Windows 10/11 I'd be surprised if it didn't. Not Delphi, but I've been helping a client update their Windows program, from a compiler which shipped in 1998. Their program, with that compiler, runs just fine on Windows 11. The backward compatibility of the Win32 API is such that I regularly use programs last compiled 20 years or more ago.
Microsoft sure has done a great job, but I have experienced some issues around Program Files and registry virtualization, along with UAC. I suppose if you run it as admin and/or install it outside Program Files it'll make it a lot less troublesome. So, not unexpected, but I'd still be mildly surprised.
Now that's rattling a thing in my brain. I recall disabling UAC was one of the more consistent ways to get Delphi 6 to even run on Windows 7, and even then it wasn't a guarantee.
Yeah, I had the displeasure around 2009-2011 of trying to get an old IDE version running on then-current versions of Windows, with multiple Vista and 7 computers in the office. It ran fine on Windows XP, but newer OSes were not so lucky.
Perhaps the solution was to purchase a newer Delphi, but that avenue wasn't sought after.
I feel like Delphi, along with maybe VB6 and WinForms, have been the pinnacle of easy UI development, and things have gone significantly downhill since then. Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.), often implicitly-configured to produce output, in head-space. And due to this dependency hell, when porting a p…
Unfortunately "dependency hell" was very real -- it was super-easy to download ActiveX controls, install on the system, and then depend on them in the apps. Worse, Windows had a single ActiveX database per computer, and an control installed by a completely unrelated app would appear in the Delphi's palette, ready to be placed on a form. After having a few apps that would not work on friends' computers, I've mostly gave up on ActiveX components completely.. luckily third-party Delphi components were better - at least the compiled binaries would work. Source code still required system-wide install though...
If you think that "pip install", or "npm install", or even "apt-get install" on a Linux system is bad, you haven't seen what Delphi world was like. But to be fair, it's not really Delphi's fault - all Windows development was like that, full of bespoke settings that need to be set on each PC. For a complex software, it was normal to spend a few days just setting up the system so you can do initial build.
Another Delphi-specific issue was that by default forms were specified in pixels, and were hard-coded to specific font sizes; and color pickers had hardcoded colors (as opposed to system theme colors) prominently displayed. Unless you were very careful, it was very easy to make an app that could not handle different font or screen theme. And many apps that would benefit greatly from being resizable were non-resizeable instead, just because it was easier.
I feel like Delphi, along with maybe VB6 and WinForms, have been the pinnacle of easy UI development, and things have gone significantly downhill since then. Especially on the web side, where even a single view sometimes requires having multiple unrelated dependencies (packers, builders, transpilers, etc.), often implicitly-configured to produce output, in head-space. And due to this dependency hell, when porting a p…
Delphi and Visual Basic 6 were definitely not the pinnacle of UI development. For example, all layout was pixel based. Making windows resizable required much complex ad-hoc code, and internationalization was hard as well. Very early in my career, I have spent person months clicking through every single screen in a large desktop application to find words cut off due to words having different lengths (measured in pixel…