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22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

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Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#311

Post by reitanqild »

Joeri wrote: post #183
reitanqild wrote: post #164

I guess I should have started on a greenfield project. For me it was less rosy. I remember my boss trying to get me started on Delphi. We basically had two or three Delphi developer workstations available because setting up one that could compile the projects we had in our vcs was a three day task - and it was only possible with the help of our resident Delphi consultant. Stuff like that has made me love Maven and Ja…

The way delphi finds its units is similar to how java finds its classes, so it can be smooth sailing or an absolute nightmare depending on how the project is laid out.

Unlike how Java finds it classes I have clear memories about installing things that would update stuff in the registry.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#312

Post by AstralStorm »

jacmoe wrote: post #301
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…

Do you even know what RAD means? 20 years ago, RAD meant that you could drop visual components on a form, add some events, set some properties, and hit the green run button to compile and run it. A very visual way of programming. QtCreator with it's visual designer comes close, but then you have to suffer a more unforgiving syntax (C++), a complex macro compiler (MOC) and not at all easy cross-compilation / distribut…

You could try Free Pascal related Lazarus instead.

Netbeans Swing support also comes close.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#313

Post by tomcam »

16bytes wrote: post #124
SyneRyder wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't ever take that much. This is an example of what a 64kB executable could accomplish in 2016: Darkness Lay Your Eyes Upon Me - Conspiracy - Revision 2016 64k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SEGm2lUSY0 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106 After watching a few 64k demoscene demos, a 380MB Electron-based minimalist text editor just seems horribly bloated. (I'm currently writing a cross-platform Windows/…

The demoscene relies heavily on procedural generation to cram a lot into a little tiny executable. GUI toolkits aren't comparable in this regard.

Red-Lang.org should convince you otherwise

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#314

Post by mattmanser »

lojack wrote: post #53
jsudhams wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss VB6 and VB.net desktop apps as well. still my go to platform for personal apps, so easy to write. Not really sure why for internal company apps people are moving to webapp.

We use web apps at my company because almost all developers know how to make them, not all computers are windows PCs, and you don't need to install anything of download anything for someone to use them. If you're talking about electron apps, that's a whole other ballgame. We don't build electron apps for internal stuff afaik.

To be fair to him, it used to be that everyone knew how to make desktop apps and no-one knew how to make web apps. So that's definitely not the reason.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#316

Post by mmgutz »

I remember Borland vs Ms

    Delphi vs VB
    TASM vs MASM
    Borland C++ OWL vs Microsfot C++/MFC
    Philippe Khan vs Gates
Delphi was the raddest RAD tool. The free VCL components for it were often better than commercial VB ActiveX components. Delphi executables were faster. Delphi could statically link everything.

I eventually had to move to VB when my Delphi job dried up. VB felt like a downgrade. I remember constantly referring to Dan Appleman's book so I could use Win32 APIs to work around the limitations of VB. I'm not knocking VB as it's one of my favorite tools too, but Delphi was the cream of the crop.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#317

Post by draegtun »

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?

Rebol/View (& SDK) was a great alternative. An extremely light weight language, library & cross-platform GUI (exe was under 1mb). Ideal for very rapid GUI prototyping...

* http://www.rebol.com/rebol-view.html

* http://www.rebol.com/docs/sdk/

* http://re-bol.com/business_programming.html

NB. I say "was" because Rebol 2 SDK has (i believe) been discontinued. Rebol 3 & Red do offer new GUI / encapping replacements but not at same level of maturity.

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#318

Post by draegtun »

StevePerkins wrote: post #37
interfixus wrote: post #22

A shocking aspect of Delphi 1 was the gargantuan executables it insisted on producing. There was much forum posting and gnashing of teeth. Hello World ran to about 100 kB. Funny thing is, I am just getting into Go, and you know what?

There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large. You can use Electron (and basically bundle Chrome), or JavaFX (and bundle a Java runtime), and they're about the same size. But even if you ship all of the Qt dynamic libs, or all of the GTK dependencies, or even wxWidgets... it's still a far cry from "light". It just takes tens of megs to make a windo…

>> There's just no way to develop a GUI application (especially a cross-platform one) without shipping something large.

It can be done, for eg. Rebol/View, a cross-platform GUI circa 1mb in size.

NB. Rebol/View used the AGG library to achieve this - http://antigrain.com/ | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Grain_Geometry

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#319

Post by draegtun »

yumaikas wrote: post #110
libx wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't heard about Red ( http://www.red-lang.org ), have you? With some Kb you can ship GUI executables for Windows, Android, OSX and Linux. (OSX and Linux soon). Try it and report back the amount of Kb (not Mb) used.

It doesn't make GUI's for OSX just yet, and I'll be interested to see if it stays that small once OSX and Linux support are added. EDIT: The version on their download page doesn't make GUI's for OSX yet, but there seem to be other versions that do.

Here is a under 700k alpha preview GUI binary for the Mac (circa July 2016) - http://static.red-lang.org/dl/mac/red-console

Re: 22 Years of Delphi and It Still Rocks

#320

Post by zhte415 »

Havoc wrote: post #69
zhte415 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half in jest and half seriousness... Excel fill this void for many many things corporate. Two decades later it is almost as good as Delphi was, just no .exe.

Mind elaborating on this? I used Delphi for years, now I'm working in Excel all day and I can't quite see the parallel you're describing?

Sure.

What my former company called 'End User Computing'. This meant developing small or not-so-small programs in the only tool capable in a corporate environment: Excel (often linked to SharePoint as a data store). Otherwise lots of forms and procedures would have to be gone through making it a tech project.

Background: Operations (not tech) mega-corporate bureaucracy where these apps were helpers.

Solution: Open up Excel, and start to code and design GUIs on the worksheet via VBA built in to Excel (and all of Office). It was a stunningly similar experience to hazy memories of Delphi in terms of GUI and code, but ultimately was using a spanner to do a screwdriver's job. Memories of Delphi were certainly hazy at this point, but it was more similar than any other tools I'd used the the decade+ since that point.

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