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Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#11

Post by pjmlp »

FeistySkink wrote: post #6

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.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#15

Post by magicalhippo »

chungy wrote: post #9
okanat wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows doesn't break backwards compatibility unless it is absolutely worse to keep it around. Think about old SMB protocol that caused security issues. The old Delphi programs continue to work since both the API design is more future-proof and Microsoft did a mind-boggling amount of work to keep ABI stable.

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 work without any change.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#16

Post by gmueckl »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #5
markus_zhang wrote: post #2

Interesting. Is it still runnable on Windows 10/11? I guess it would be still fun to use Delphi for personal projects.

Should. Visual Studio 6 / Visual Basic 6.0 keeps running on Windows 10/11

MS has actively maintained compatibility between the VB6 runtime and Windows.

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#17

Post by magicalhippo »

WillAdams wrote: post #13

Is this applicable to: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

While not exactly 1:1, the vast majority should be.

The Free Pascal language used by Lazarus is very similar to Delphi's Object Pascal[1], and the Lazarus Component Library[2] is modeled to closely match Delphi's Visual Component Library.

[1]: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Object_Pascal

[2]: https://wiki.freepascal.org/LCL

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#18

Post by marcocantu »

pjmlp wrote: post #12

Many thanks Marco for providing this.

Thank you, it was a nice project, partially walking down the memory lane, but also checking how many features in that version of Delphi are still core today -- not just for the product but for the industry

Re: Mastering Delphi 5 2025 Annotated Edition Is Now Complete

#20

Post by marcocantu »

magicalhippo wrote: post #15
chungy wrote: post #9

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 rebuild a large number of demos with no change. Well, the UI looks date, you need to manually enable HighDPI (one checkbox away), do a few tweaks. The IDE plugins, those are broken. And some libraries don't ship any more.
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