I come here not to bury Delphi, but to praise it (2019)

> They made a half-hearted attempt to port it to Linux but did so using Wine(lib) which back then was very rough, so Kylix had a poor UX and of course the problem was that the Delphi widget toolkit was the Windows toolkit which Linux didn't have.

I think the UX was fine as it was made to work with KDE1/Qt1 which was very Windows-like (in appearance and behavior) at the time, but the real issue was that instead of trying to make VCL work crossplatform (like Lazarus' LCL does) they made a different framework (IIRC it was called CLX) which used Qt1 and was very incompatible.

They released a free version with the limitation that your program had to be GPL, though at the time it was fine as GPL wasn't the boogieman it is today. Sometimes i wonder if Borland had released the entirety of Kylix under GPL and thus gained mindshare among open source programmers at a time when Linux had started becoming more popular among programmers if things would be different for Delphi - if nothing else it wouldn't be seen as some ultra-expensive tool that people only use because they have no way to move away from. At the time Borland made money from enterprises (which would buy the expensive enterprise version anyway) and proprietary desktop software developers (which wouldn't use the GPL version anyway) so having Delphi as a GPL'd program wouldn't affect them much but instead have the tool's mindshare expand and even have developers help Borland fix bugs with their framework and improve their compiler.

I was thinking that a couple of years ago when i tried the free version of Kylix under my Linux installation and it failed to work with all sorts of errors despite my efforts - but errors that should be simple to fix if the source code was available. Then i tried it in a VM running some Linux version from the early 2000s and it worked, which made me think how nice it'd be if it was a GPL'd software i could modify.

After that nostalgia session, i deleted the VM, downloaded the latest version of Lazarus and fixed the Gtk1 support[0] because i could as that is open source (ok ignore the broken images, that is because the shot is from a few months ago when i tried to remove the gdk_pixbuf dependency, normally they look fine but that is the only screenshot i had around :-P). FWIW the fixes were merged in (and i made some extra fixes since then).

[0] https://i.imgur.com/su9JCUY.png

If RAD Studio/C++ Builder allowed building Linux desktop apps, I would have likely bought the architect edition. VCL is so much faster to develop than any other framework.

C# and TypeScript have both been pretty open (in nature and source) for roughly a decade. Which I appreciate. Although, I'm somewhat apprehensive about some of MS's moves with the .Net community, and their holding back on quality of life improvements for C# projects in VS Code.

Although, MS hasn't caused me to generally avoid .Net so much as the more "enterprise" nature of most of the projects I've had experience with. I started with .Net (C#) in 2001, and to this day think there is a lot to like there. Of course these days, I'd appreciate the opportunity to work with Rust more than C#.

In the early days of Delphi I considered it to be a huge competitive advantage in terms of productivity and speed against everything out there. As time went on, though, it slowly died, and it became increasingly difficult to find and integrate 3rd party libraries, or find developers to work in the system. The user interface aspects of it also became dated and difficult to make modern.

Too bad, as I really liked it, especially the language. I liked the AMIGA as well, which also was ahead of its time and seemed to suffer a similar fate.

The one negative I've found with Lazarus... And this is purely if you were someone coming from a Delphi background, or were planning on Lazarus being your "get out of jail free" card if [Embarcadero/(whoever owns it now)] decides to stop updating Delphi (and even then you could probably manage it's lack of updates for years, hell I stayed on Delphi 2007 for a good 8 or 9 years after XE, XE1, XE2 et al had been out).. Anyways, back to my point, the one major negative I've found with Lazarus is you simply can not take Delphi code, and compile it straight in Lazarus... There are many many many very subtle differences. Totally fine and understandable, but if you were planning on taking the attitude of "Stuff Delphi, lets take our 400k line project and move to Lazarus", you are going to have a bad time.

Having said that I've done a couple of my own projects at home in Lazarus. It's fine, it feels dated, going back to the original Delphi / VB style of RAD tool with form designer/code editor as floating windows etc. The intellisense leaves something to be desired, but I can't be too critical because it's not like I'm putting my hand up to contribute to the project. If you look at what you get for what you pay for, it's quite literally amazing.