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22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

blog.marcocantu.com

281–290 of 344 posts

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#281
post #259
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just that the language is bad, it's also that the ecosystem encourages bloat and terrible implementations with layers of fixes glued on top of each other. My current main work laptop (a pre-TouchBar generation MBP) can only barely run a "heavy" JS-application like Slack and something like IntelliJ at the same time. Migrating Slack into an IRC client reduces the CPU & memory footprint of _sending, receiving a…

>My current main work laptop (a pre-TouchBar generation MBP) can only barely run a "heavy" JS-application like Slack and something like IntelliJ at the same time. Is this hyperbole? I run both of these with IntelliJ memory settings maxed out on a MPB no problem. Granted, I have 16GB of memory, so understandably YMMV.

> Is this hyperbole?

No. Just checked and this is an 8GB machine, running Slack with ~9 simultaneous networks (unfortunately lots of open source projects are moving to half-deserted Slack networks instead of IRC channels) can easily use more than half of that.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#282
post #187

I'm moderator in one of the oldest/largest delphi forum in latin-america: http://clubdelphi.com/ Ironically, I don't use Delphi anymore. Yet, I still help people with it and defend it when is possible. Delphi is amazing . It only have a HUGE problem: His owners. You can re4ad why Delphi fade away here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail?share=1 "Borland lost its way when executive management decided to change…

> In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely."

And he is 100% correct. It's way easier to double the profit from 100 customers than it is 1 million.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this? I'll tell you. Microsoft and Apple need to protect their native app license revenue, so they hobbled Netscape, brought browser development in house, and made a prohibition on allowing web pages to be integrated tightly into the OS. If those electron apps could get the same OS integration in the browse…

2005 called and want's it's arguments back. Microsoft has been moving a lot of products to the web where possible, for example Office 365.

1998 called and told it's a mistake. Those are not 2005's arguments, those are 1995/96 ones - before MISE4 knocked on the door with Active Desktop.

Before the .NET age, Microsoft was very active with ideas about bringing Web on desktop.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#284
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems... backwards. What integration could MS give to web apps that they aren't already? Microsoft replaced their help file format with HTML starting with Vista. HTML and JS are first-class languages for building UWP apps. If anything, it's Netscape's lawsuit against MS for bundling IE that kept them from doing more to integrate web pages into the OS, not the moving of browser development in-house.

Start menu integration, USB device access, graphics and sound APIs, notifications... Just look at the Windows APIs there are a wealth of things Microsoft doesn't want in browsers if they can avoid it. Well... there are people on the browser team trying their best, but the resource constraints keep investment where it needs to be to protect Windows and Office licensing.

> Start menu integration, USB device access, graphics and sound APIs, notifications...

You can get all that through UWP, though, can't you?

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#285

I remember using Delphi 2 when I was younger, that's how I learned programming. If you don't mind hearing my personal story, keep reading, otherwise move on to another comment. By an interesting coincidence I was given a CD with tons of software on it, including Delphi 2. I started playing with it and quickly realised I could create my own programs using that tool. Later I went to the book store and found a book abou…

I started programming in basic (first on ZX spectrum clone, then QBasic) but really started writing meaningful programs in BP7 and then Delphi. On the other hand I'm pretty sure that I learned english by printing out the whole readme for Build engine that was on the Duke Nukem 3D CD and reading that.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#286
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is simple counterargument: there is integrated runtime for webapps in windows since at least windows 98 (probably since 95 desktop update bundled with IE4). Just rename HTML file to .hta. Running that gets you IE window without any browser UI and scripts in the page run outside any sandbox and can interact with windows API anyway they want. Various windows components are exactly this.

Most users can't rename files, so this feature de facto doesn't exist.

Why users have to rename anything? Do they have to rename .exes or .msi?

In early '00s, there surely were apps made and distributed as .hta files. Not much as .exes, of course, because even with ActiveX, DHTML was quite limited.

Heck, when I was in school, me and a buddy wrote a desktop web chat client using that tech (we wanted fancy text formatting and image posting that "official" webchat page hadn't, but we had - because it server lacked proper HTML sanitization, lol)

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want to see Delphi compile times on a modern i7 and a fast SSD. For small-ish projects that should be pretty much instantaneously.

This video shows a million lines of code in five seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq2mNUzcpE0

Just about sums up why I still use it if I want to get something done.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#288
post #282
post #187

I'm moderator in one of the oldest/largest delphi forum in latin-america: http://clubdelphi.com/ Ironically, I don't use Delphi anymore. Yet, I still help people with it and defend it when is possible. Delphi is amazing . It only have a HUGE problem: His owners. You can re4ad why Delphi fade away here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Borland-fail?share=1 "Borland lost its way when executive management decided to change…

> In the height of the enterprise transformation, I asked Del Yocam, one of many interim CEOs after Kahn, "Are you saying you want to trade a million loyal $100 customers for a hundred $1 million customers?" Yocam replied without hesitation "Absolutely." And he is 100% correct. It's way easier to double the profit from 100 customers than it is 1 million.

Correct only for money. But a language MUST go for reach.

Is no that is bad to try to catch the fat-money, is that them forget the rest.

This make Delphi fade. And impossible to some of us to even continue using it.

---

The current free version is something new, however this have been try before but never consistently, so is unsure if I get Delphi free now it will continue.

This make risky to get it.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#289

Shout-out to Lazarus/FreePascal. It is like all the best parts of Delphi 5-7, and it is open source, free, and you can make commercial applications in it! I have started using it in earnest and it is wonderful - and a company can never take it away from you; there's no "we're shifting focus..." announcements. No paid support for broken updates. I honestly can't recommend it enough.

+1 Amazing IDE and yes I have made a couple of commercial applications in it now :-)
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