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Borland C++ Builder (2015)

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Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#31

Post by kogus »

marcodiego wrote: post #7

I have to repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28491963 again: My main problem with delphi: it is "too proprietary". It was a very productive IDE in the 90's or early 2000's but lost their path and never recovered. Some new versions broke compatibility with previous version's components. There was the case where you paid a good amount of money on some proprietary components and they simply wouldn't work in the…

I worked with Delphi for several years, and it was the first IDE I used professionally. It was truly brilliant for developing Win32 and WinForms applications. I can honestly say that Delphi 5 was a better tool for building Windows apps than the latest versions Visual Studio, at least in terms of usability, responsiveness, and debugging.

But man are you ever right about the compatibility issues! Upgrading from Delphi 5 to the (then current) Delphi 2005 was a total nightmare. Our codebase was about 600k lines, and I will never forget the trauma of trying to get it to just build in the newer version.

The comparison with .NET codebases that "just work" from version to version is night and day, and sadly it's worth putting up with a laggy beast of an IDE to have that security around your projects.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#32

Post by professoretc »

Topolomancer wrote: post #20

My first IDE when I started to be excited about programming! I vividly remember a book that was about teaching C++ to kids; I devoured it and spent a glorious summer just fiddling with what I thought was very complex code at the time. How time flies...

Yep, I'm pretty sure Borland C++ was what I used in college in my first "real" programming class. The nice thing about the older IDEs was how easy it was to get started programming: start it up and you're looking at a blank source file; often you can compile and run without even officially saving it! Made it really easy to try things out. The only "IDE" that comes close to that level of immediacy today would be something like Processing.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#33

Post by jll29 »

There are many posters that complain about Borland Builder´s price tag, but what they may not realize is what Microsoft charged back then for Visual Studio C/C++ (plus the MSDN subscription fees) was likewise a lot.

You got piles of books and piles of floppy disks (later piles of CDROMs) for that.

Only recently, free development tools have become available that rival commercial offerings.

But most serious developers do not care about a few thousand dollars in tooling cost, because the main determinant of software cost is developer salaries and nothing else. Since they are typically six digit dollar amounts, the cost for tools like editors, IDEs, compilers and libraries pales in comparison or becomes a rounding error.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#34

Post by jen20 »

zwieback wrote: post #28
tragomaskhalos wrote: post #15

I have a vague memory of a Borland C++ coming bundled with a rather funky Smalltalk-inspired container library - this was pre-STL and in fact pre-templates even. Perhaps another old fart can confirm or correct?

I think early Borland container libraries had a "Object" base class for everything, pre templates. All that went away as C++ compilers started supporting templates more. I remember this era as always making tradeoffs between code size, memory consumption, standardness and performance. Not sorry those days are over...

These days we get huge binaries, unbounded memory consumption, no standards and awful performance. Much better!

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#35

Post by looping__lui »

danjoredd wrote: post #16
jart wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is $500/year really the going rate for a kidney? That's like the price to rent some GPUs for an overnight training job. I think it's perfectly reasonable that Embarcadero makes their software free to use until it's helped you earn at least 10x that much revenue, on top of it being a flat rate. Most companies just divide their offerings into strictly commercial / non-commercial.

If you make 5k 500 is 1/10 of your yearly income. That is a pretty big amount, especially when you take out taxes and operating expenses. Thats why I said it isn't worth it UNTIL you are a bigger business.

Well, as a beekeeper if you wanna sell some honey you need to buy some bees first, no? You’d probably spend more money getting tools and equipment for a one-person neighborhood lawn mowing business…

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#36

Post by godot »

jll29 wrote: post #33

There are many posters that complain about Borland Builder´s price tag, but what they may not realize is what Microsoft charged back then for Visual Studio C/C++ (plus the MSDN subscription fees) was likewise a lot. You got piles of books and piles of floppy disks (later piles of CDROMs) for that. Only recently, free development tools have become available that rival commercial offerings. But most serious developers…

For companies I think you're right; but a price tag of a few thousand dollars was a strong deterrent for students or hobbyists/learners to get into doing those development. I think the web was great for learners in the 90s/00s because no special tools were necessary. All you needed was Notepad and a browser. If you did some CGI/Perl or PHP you may also need a $5-$20/mo web host account, that's about it.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#37

Post by pascal_wizzard »

canistel wrote: post #23
pascal_wizzard wrote: post #9

Don't use delphi, the rad sucks for everything but dragging and dropping components. The drag and drop is also a pain in the ass because it will constantly adjust the layout, making every commit be filled with noise. Maybe all frontend is this bad though, I don't have much experience with other tools.

But wouldn't careful usage of margins, anchoring and aligning - if it is possible - take care of this?

In the dfm(the UI declaration file) the positions of elements are always absolute with relation to the forms top left point, they are just recalculated on the fly when a change in the form causes them to resize. Using alignment is great but it doesn't solve the problem. Not really that big of an issue in the big picture, just makes diffing forms annoying.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#38

Post by haolez »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #5

I used to work at a Delphi shop that switched to C++. Of course we used C++ Builder. The component palette was identical to Delphi (and was still Object Pascal code). You could use Delphi UI components with it. C++ support was a bit buggy in places, but not terrible. I had worse problems compiling C++ on AIX. Delphi and C++ Builder were simply the best native UI creation tools I've ever used.

I remember trying to compile OpenCV 2 for it and the compiler would segfault on me.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#39

Post by zakki »

godot wrote: post #36
jll29 wrote: post #33

There are many posters that complain about Borland Builder´s price tag, but what they may not realize is what Microsoft charged back then for Visual Studio C/C++ (plus the MSDN subscription fees) was likewise a lot. You got piles of books and piles of floppy disks (later piles of CDROMs) for that. Only recently, free development tools have become available that rival commercial offerings. But most serious developers…

For companies I think you're right; but a price tag of a few thousand dollars was a strong deterrent for students or hobbyists/learners to get into doing those development. I think the web was great for learners in the 90s/00s because no special tools were necessary. All you needed was Notepad and a browser. If you did some CGI/Perl or PHP you may also need a $5-$20/mo web host account, that's about it.

And todays students will shape the future. If something not relevant with student’s now, it will not relevant with student’s future. Finally that thing will be forgotten.

Re: Borland C++ Builder (2015)

#40

Post by [deleted] »

neverartful wrote: post #14
jart wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is $500/year really the going rate for a kidney? That's like the price to rent some GPUs for an overnight training job. I think it's perfectly reasonable that Embarcadero makes their software free to use until it's helped you earn at least 10x that much revenue, on top of it being a flat rate. Most companies just divide their offerings into strictly commercial / non-commercial.

There are 4 different editions. $500/year is the cheapest of those 4 editions. https://www.embarcadero.com/app-development-tools-store/cbui...

[deleted]
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