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22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#291

Post by boznz »

wila wrote: post #242
mberger wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but the key point (at least for me) is the cross platform. We recently had a client send us their environment setup. Everything ran on AIX except for our stuff. That means they had to specially buy windows server licences just for our product. feelsbadman.

With delphi targeting macOS a GUI app starts at about 18MB. Not tiny, but certainly not too bad.

Ouch, thats pretty inefficient IMHO. I have a Windows database client written in Delphi XE2 that covers the whole MRP for a winery including built in reports and report writer that clocks in at 14MB http://rodyne.com/?page_id=375

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#292

Post by jacmoe »

johnsea wrote: post #205
jacmoe wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lazarus and Free Pascal has made me return to the wonderful world of RAD and Object Pascal. :) I was a Delphi addict in the 90's. After Borland screwed up Delphi - including the Kylix disaster - and since I am now a full time Linux user - Lazarus is the only option. I have been following the Lazarus / Free Pascal project for years, and I think now is a good time to pick it up. I wish that it had more traction, though…

No traction because it's a mess. No git, no markdown, no clear organization, dated look in almost everything. Very unuserfriedly to just 'hop in'. No money unfortunately and most (all?) devs do it in their sparetime. Splitted between different attempts, FreePascal, MSE, Oxygene, Smartpascal, Newpascal, maybe more? Nevertheless, Lazarus and Free Pascal is very good and important work. Wish they would modernize to the…

I am actively using Lazarus. It is not split into anything other than Free Pascal (the language) and Lazarus (IDE and visual component library).

Don't blame the forks, mods and spin offs on Lazarus / Free Pascal. It is a sign that the project is alive and doing well, IMO.

The looks? It looks like any other Qt / GTK 2/3 application. Fairly modern.

But I agree with you on some of the points - but the part that I like the best is the fact that it's fully open source. It's really nice to be able to look at the source to everything when developing your own applications.

Yes, the site itself, including the docs, looks dated and does a poor job of selling it. That's Open Source, the good and the bad.

Edit: The project does have a (mandatory these days, I reckon) Github mirror, if that would make you more happy. :)

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#293

Post by boznz »

tluyben2 wrote: post #85
muyuu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately. http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Did you try it? I try it every year (I was a Delphi fan and full time Delphi programmer from Delph-1 to 6) but it is not very good. The Pascal compiler is brilliant and fast but Lazarus itself is unusable every time I try. It often begins by failing to build the basic form until I go through a bunch of steps to fix the install. That's going to put most people off as Delphi never had that issue; it was install-and-go.…

Installing Lazarus from the package managers in Linux really does suck even today, I wish they would fix it or just remove it from those repositories.

I Finally got the Linux version running on Mint by downloading and installing the files from their repository as recommended and it was a nice experience after that

Windows is another matter entirely, just download the setup, run it and go

Lazarus is a very active project, currently I rate it up there with delphi XE2 (the version I use currently) and it can only improve

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#294

Post by flukus »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #240
yoodenvranx wrote: post #43

Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?

> 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…

Back when MS was hobbling netscape web apps weren't a possibility, machines simply did not have enough memory to run them.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#295

Post by atombender »

vic20forever wrote: post #268
ptero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Pascal is a good, clean language and Borland was a top engineering shop that built Delphi as a rapid development tool that supported Windows . At the time there was nothing comparable for Windows development. There was a huge marked for Windows consumer applications and games (Linux was not a household name yet) and very little outside of clumsy Visual Studio to write them. I recall reading at WSJ at the time tha…

In 1994, I was looking at languages for a Windows GUI project, and I narrowed my options down to Borland ObjectVision (a sort-of "predecessor" to Delphi) and Visual Basic 3.0. I went with VB3 because the userbase was larger, but I've always wondered how my career would have played out if I'd chosen the other path.

You're probably thinking of Object Windows Library (OWL) [1], a C++ library that was available to both Turbo Pascal for Windows and Borland C++, and which was briefly available for other platforms, including several Unix variants.

Borland also had the older Turbo Vision toolkit, but that was for MS-DOS. OWL was designed a very similar class hiearchy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Windows_Library

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#296

Post by squarefoot »

ealexhudson wrote: post #105
ptero wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO Pascal is a good, clean language and Borland was a top engineering shop that built Delphi as a rapid development tool that supported Windows . At the time there was nothing comparable for Windows development. There was a huge marked for Windows consumer applications and games (Linux was not a household name yet) and very little outside of clumsy Visual Studio to write them. I recall reading at WSJ at the time tha…

They produced Kylix not that long ago - I had an original box set once upon a time. I have no idea why that didn't take off, but it was an excellent environment really.

Kylix was doomed from day one; I saw an official presentation (IIRC by Marco Cantù himself) ages ago and was shocked by its slugginess. At that time I was playing with Delphi2 at home and using Delphi 4 at work, and both of them literally run circles around Kylix. Today Delphi on Linux to me is called Lazarus. Some nasty bugs plaguing it are long gone since like 3 years and is very stable at the moment. You can even install it on a ARM based board (Orange PI PC here) which means it doesn't simply cross compile the code but the IDE itself runs on ARM architecture!

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#297

Post by geoelectric »

emcrazyone wrote: post #163
vintagedave wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no Linux targets? Linux is coming in the next release - there will be a blog on that soon. It already has Mac, iOS, and Android on top of its Windows support. Honestly, I do not believe that Python or Tcl/Tk count as "good" RAD cross-platform tools. Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to. We regularly have customers give feedback about their productivity with Delphi/C++Builder, ve…

They had a Linux port at one time. It was called Kylix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix Developing on Linux desktop at that time probably wasn't ready for this.

There were some other issues then (I worked for Borland at the time, QAing Kylix) including not really understanding the FOSS community and GPL-the-social-movement part very well.

There was a particularly big flap over them not stripping the corporate audit clause from the free Kylix Open Edition version targeted at OSS dev; and another regarding enforcing the mandatory "Made with Kylix Open Edition" splash screen that was linked into your app at the compiler level, since all the library code was technically modifiable per licensing.

I also seem to recall that they managed to standardize on Red Hat 7.2, which I think had the much maligned gcc 2.96 fork in it and possibly an older glibc, and then had problems with later kernel/glibc/something along those lines versions such that you were locked into the "bad" version of Red Hat using it.

I probably have some of the tech details jumbled 16 years later, but the TL;DR was that the development community for Linux is nothing like the development community for Windows, especially back then. There were simply different cultural expectations and a hugely diverse set of environments to target, along with a swiftly moving ecosystem to link against.

Upshot, Kylix more or less flopped and Borland switched gears to Java/JBuilder-based IDEs for C++ compilation (C++BuilderX), then back around full circle later focusing on single-platform IDEs for .NET/native Windows.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#298

Post by flukus »

marvin wrote: post #72
yoodenvranx wrote: post #43

Delphi is still unrivaled when it comes to rapid GUI prototyping in combination with easy deployment. It's much easier than QT/GTK and you usually get a standalone .exe with no external dependencies. I really want to cry when I see the current alternatives... Node/Electron with dozens of MB of runtime and all that Javascript stuff? What went wrong that we end up with this?

Windows Forms is still a completely decent option that gives you the same advantages.

Windows Forms was (and is) primitive compared to how easy qt/gtk and just about every windows toolkit ever made. It was built for machines to generate, not for humans to code, so when the code generation breaks (and it will) so does winforms.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#299

Post by Animats »

analognoise wrote: post #181

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.

I just ported an old Pascal program to Free Pascal, and it went very well. It's a nice system.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#300

Post by shakna »

codewritinfool wrote: post #130

As a pascal user since the early 80's, then an Object Pascal user, then a Delphi user since the first version, I love Delphi but to be honest I cannot afford the yearly updates. For someone that uses it for home projects, $916 for an upgrade is out of the question. Rambling here, but... Delphi 3/5/7 were incredible design packages. I feel they lost focus when they jumped on the .NET bandwagon - maybe it is just my pe…

Lazarus [0] and FreePascal [1]?

> Free Pascal tries to implement a Borland compatible pascal compiler on as many platforms as possible.

[0] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

[1] http://www.freepascal.org/

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