Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5 • Hacker News Board

Re: Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

#11

Post by zura » Sat, Jan 18, 2014, 4:37 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #5

networked wrote: post #4

According Embarcadero's website Delphi XE5 offers all the same plus Android support: http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi , http://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder . If they're targeting mobile developers I wonder why Embarcadero hasn't released a cheap "indie" version of Delphi yet. Last I checked it had much better compile times than C++Builder and the language itself could easily be marketed as a "frien…

I used to love Borland tools. Having learned Turbo Pascal before C, I never liked C, given the capabilities of Turbo Pascal. Type safety, blazing compile times, modules, system level programming, objects. Management killed Borland products thanks to their continuous change of brand, lack of investment on Kylix and Anders going to Microsoft. Most customers became reluctant to keep investing on their tooling.

My experience was quite the opposite - Borland C++ 3.1 and I never liked Pascal ;)

Re: Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

#12

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jan 18, 2014, 4:52 PM UTC

tux10 wrote: post #10

pjmlp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is just you, it might be expensive, but it is pretty cheap for big companies, when you compare it with other commercial frameworks or compilers.

Yeah I am talking about individuals. I guess I am not their target customer though. Obviously to big companies a few thousand is nothing (especially when you look at >$10k for MSDN Ultimate) but Embarcadero have zero products aimed towards the individual developer (not even the Starter Edition is worth it as it is so limited for the price).

> Embarcadero have zero products aimed towards the individual developer

I think that is a sign of what the company has become, after being about to close so many times.

I bet it lives mostly from enterprise legacy contracts nowadays.

Re: Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

#13

Post by networked » Sat, Jan 18, 2014, 4:56 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #5

networked wrote: post #4

According Embarcadero's website Delphi XE5 offers all the same plus Android support: http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi , http://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder . If they're targeting mobile developers I wonder why Embarcadero hasn't released a cheap "indie" version of Delphi yet. Last I checked it had much better compile times than C++Builder and the language itself could easily be marketed as a "frien…

I used to love Borland tools. Having learned Turbo Pascal before C, I never liked C, given the capabilities of Turbo Pascal. Type safety, blazing compile times, modules, system level programming, objects. Management killed Borland products thanks to their continuous change of brand, lack of investment on Kylix and Anders going to Microsoft. Most customers became reluctant to keep investing on their tooling.

What you're saying rings true to me. I also learned Borland/Turbo/Object Pascal first (perhaps somewhat unusually, I went from Borland Pascal to C++ to Delphi when learning to program as a kid). Although I can't say I never liked C there are many things about Object Pascal I found superior that I miss in C, especially the built-in string type (for those who haven't used it, in C-land it can be compared to bstrings but it's handled completely transparently).

If you wanted to use Object Pascal today and not have to rely on Embarcadero for the continued support of your tools you could use Free Pascal and Lazarus, which are both free software (GPL-licensed). Unfortunately, there's bit of a stigma against using any variant of Pascal these days (to which, no doubt, the many crappy CRUD apps written in Delphi and Borland's management of their product have both contributed), so it's not a good choice for new projects, especially free and open source. I wonder if Nimrod could be the comeback of type-safe compiled languages that don't target the JVM.

Re: Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

#14

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jan 18, 2014, 4:58 PM UTC

zura wrote: post #11

pjmlp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to love Borland tools. Having learned Turbo Pascal before C, I never liked C, given the capabilities of Turbo Pascal. Type safety, blazing compile times, modules, system level programming, objects. Management killed Borland products thanks to their continuous change of brand, lack of investment on Kylix and Anders going to Microsoft. Most customers became reluctant to keep investing on their tooling.

My experience was quite the opposite - Borland C++ 3.1 and I never liked Pascal ;)

Thankfully C++ is not just the C underpinnings.

I got to use C (Turbo C 2.0) just during one year, and quickly jumped into C++ with Turbo C++ 3.0 in 1993.

With C++ I could get a bit of Turbo Pascal features back.

During my studies and career, I only used pure C when forced to so.

Re: Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

#15

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jan 18, 2014, 5:03 PM UTC

networked wrote: post #13

pjmlp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to love Borland tools. Having learned Turbo Pascal before C, I never liked C, given the capabilities of Turbo Pascal. Type safety, blazing compile times, modules, system level programming, objects. Management killed Borland products thanks to their continuous change of brand, lack of investment on Kylix and Anders going to Microsoft. Most customers became reluctant to keep investing on their tooling.

What you're saying rings true to me. I also learned Borland/Turbo/Object Pascal first (perhaps somewhat unusually, I went from Borland Pascal to C++ to Delphi when learning to program as a kid). Although I can't say I never liked C there are many things about Object Pascal I found superior that I miss in C, especially the built-in string type (for those who haven't used it, in C-land it can be compared to bstrings bu…

> Unfortunately, there's bit of a stigma against using any variant of Pascal these days

Ada seems to be only one really surviving, but it has a niche in only in areas where security and human lifes have priority over frames per second.

> I wonder if Nimrod could be the comeback of type-safe compiled languages that don't target the JVM.

I have been looking at it lately, but it seems to be a one man show, right?

Re: Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

#16

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jan 18, 2014, 5:04 PM UTC

malkia wrote: post #9

pjmlp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to love Borland tools. Having learned Turbo Pascal before C, I never liked C, given the capabilities of Turbo Pascal. Type safety, blazing compile times, modules, system level programming, objects. Management killed Borland products thanks to their continuous change of brand, lack of investment on Kylix and Anders going to Microsoft. Most customers became reluctant to keep investing on their tooling.

I loved it too. I moved to "C" because of one missing function in Pascal (and as I would say now - it's runtime library) - "movefile" - e.g. moving file from one directory to another. Also someone was spreading rumours that all games were written in C/C++ so we had to move to it :) When I learned assembly, and got my Ralph Brown's interrupt list (best thing ever back in the days) I went back to Pascal and made little…

We were doing games in Turbo Pascal with a bit of inline assembly here and there. :)

Re: Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

#17

Post by lobster_johnson » Sat, Jan 18, 2014, 5:05 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #5

networked wrote: post #4

According Embarcadero's website Delphi XE5 offers all the same plus Android support: http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi , http://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder . If they're targeting mobile developers I wonder why Embarcadero hasn't released a cheap "indie" version of Delphi yet. Last I checked it had much better compile times than C++Builder and the language itself could easily be marketed as a "frien…

I used to love Borland tools. Having learned Turbo Pascal before C, I never liked C, given the capabilities of Turbo Pascal. Type safety, blazing compile times, modules, system level programming, objects. Management killed Borland products thanks to their continuous change of brand, lack of investment on Kylix and Anders going to Microsoft. Most customers became reluctant to keep investing on their tooling.

They really, really wanted to become an "enterprise" company. They acquired certain management people who saw development tools as a dead end, and decided all the money was in the enterprise.

But they misjudged the market, and invested in products like Visibroker and Midas (and dead-end tech like CORBA), not really understanding what they ought to be building.

(This wasn't the beginning of their troubles, though. They bungled a lot of decisions before then, especially with the purchase of dBase and Paradox, and the Windows version of Quattro Pro.)

I stopped using Delphi in the late 1990s, but even then I could see how it was heading towards obsolescence. Not the GUI development model itself, which was brilliant and which I sorely miss for OS X GUI development today, but Object Pascal.

Sure, Object Pascal is a good language, but it was very insular, not portable, often very Windows-specific, didn't integrate well with other things, and didn't evolve fast enough. I was able to work with C and C++ libraries, including Dialogic hardware APIs and Microsoft tech such as MAPI and TAPI, by writing a translator (htrans) that parsed header files into an AST and produced Object Pascal interface files for them. But it was very tiring. I had high hopes for C++Builder, but it was a major disappointment when it arrived. For one, it relied on a lot of proprietary C++ extensions.

I was using Delphi/Object Pascal for a lot a systems development, non-GUI backend stuff. It seems a bit quixotic today, but it was fun, and I liked the language. It sort of filled a particular niche that Java would overtake a few years later.

Re: Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

#18

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jan 18, 2014, 5:07 PM UTC

malkia wrote: post #8

japaget wrote: post #2

Embarcadero C++Builder is the successor to Borland's Turbo C. It has changed names several times, having been marketed under the brands Borland, Inprise, CodeGear, and Embarcadero.

Makes me wonder if they should not bring the old Borland name (or even Turbo). That'll resonate at least with a lot more older developers (that might be managers now). I stared with programming with TURBO.COM (Turbo Pascal 3.0) - it was 33kb DOS executable and had built-in editor - fit on a diskette, and there was space for other things. I skipped version 4 (Turbo/Borland Pascal) and had most fun with 5.0 and 5.5, th…

Delphi could have been the modern C# if Borland had better management, I would say.

Re: Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

#19

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jan 18, 2014, 5:13 PM UTC

lobster_johnson wrote: post #17

pjmlp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to love Borland tools. Having learned Turbo Pascal before C, I never liked C, given the capabilities of Turbo Pascal. Type safety, blazing compile times, modules, system level programming, objects. Management killed Borland products thanks to their continuous change of brand, lack of investment on Kylix and Anders going to Microsoft. Most customers became reluctant to keep investing on their tooling.

They really, really wanted to become an "enterprise" company. They acquired certain management people who saw development tools as a dead end, and decided all the money was in the enterprise. But they misjudged the market, and invested in products like Visibroker and Midas (and dead-end tech like CORBA), not really understanding what they ought to be building. (This wasn't the beginning of their troubles, though. The…

Thanks for sharing your experience, very interesting.

I left the ecosystem around Delphi 1.0, when I started to be more focused on UNIX at the university and only had p2c available. :(

For me C++ has the way out as it provided many of the language capabilities that Object Pascal also had.

Like many C++ early adopters, I also created my own set of classes (vector, string, lists) that insulated me from the unsafe C world as most as possible.

Due to its ubiquity, C++ is my language to go for native coding, but I hope one day it gets replaced by Rust, D, Nimrod or any other safer systems programming language.

Re: Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

#20

Post by lobster_johnson » Sat, Jan 18, 2014, 5:14 PM UTC

networked wrote: post #13

pjmlp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to love Borland tools. Having learned Turbo Pascal before C, I never liked C, given the capabilities of Turbo Pascal. Type safety, blazing compile times, modules, system level programming, objects. Management killed Borland products thanks to their continuous change of brand, lack of investment on Kylix and Anders going to Microsoft. Most customers became reluctant to keep investing on their tooling.

What you're saying rings true to me. I also learned Borland/Turbo/Object Pascal first (perhaps somewhat unusually, I went from Borland Pascal to C++ to Delphi when learning to program as a kid). Although I can't say I never liked C there are many things about Object Pascal I found superior that I miss in C, especially the built-in string type (for those who haven't used it, in C-land it can be compared to bstrings bu…

Nimrod does indeed look very much inspired by Object Pascal (it even uses the classic Borland "T" and "P" prefixes for types and pointers, respectively, something I honestly never liked).

Object Pascal was a fine language, but I don't see the point of using it today, not without removing a lot of the historical Pascal warts (begin/end, the weird semicolon rules, somewhat poor integration with C, etc.), and then you pretty much end up with Java.