24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2019-february-24-years-delphi.html

by mariuz • 7 years ago

204 162 7 years ago

blog.marcocantu.com

protomyth• 7 years ago

Got to say, other than the font being much nicer now, some of those old screens look a whole lot better and easier to navigate. I miss buttons that look like buttons.

agumonkey3• 7 years ago

I have a weird feeling these days, that improvements didn't happen at the right place and that old GUI paradigms were just right and that if you knew how to leverage what a computer can do (mind you you could do sml and prolog back in the days) you wouldn't much fancier presentation..

hnzix2• 7 years ago

old GUI paradigms were just right

It's a permutation of "worse is better". Skeuomorphism and hierarchical organization cargo-culted as evil, ignoring that our traditional built environments work using these paradigms.

User-hostile design. Let's replace all buttons and text labels with arbitrary flat abstract icons! See also: nosql and SPAs.

dfox6• 7 years ago

One interesting observation is that Delphi 1 copied the Word 6/Excel 4 "ctrl3d" UI style, but not quite exactly. Typical Delphi-ism are the Paradox-like (well, duh) tabs on bottom edge of the window, which look good as long as the window isn't modal dialog (compare the tabs on code editor window and on the project settings dialog). And another more subtle, but sure signal of Delphi 1 application are the black borders inside text fields (and then also TBitBtn, but that is another thing which in the 3.1 days looked reasonable and not totally ugly as it does in anything after windows 95).

userbinator2• 7 years ago

Comparing the sizes of the apps made with the two different versions, and the environments they ran under, is most revealing: the old one has a more complex and 3D UI, yet uses a fraction of the resources of the new one that looks bland and lifeless. What's more difficult to draw, a 3D button with an integrated icon or a flat one that just has a single piece of text?

Whatever it is, this is not progress.

helloworld• 7 years ago

I forgot that Delphi was sort of a mash-up of Visual Basic and Pascal. Two great tastes, I guess.

Are there contemporary products -- for building mobile and/or web apps -- that are similarly easy to use?

the_trapper• 7 years ago

You should check out Lazarus. It's basically open source Delphi and cross platform, write once, compile anywhere.

http://www.lazarus-ide.org

softgrow2• 7 years ago

And lazarus (ie. free Pascal) will compile Turbo Pascal code without a lot of effort. Was quite amazed to resurrect a discrete event simulation I first wrote on VAX Pascal, ported to Turbo Pascal (and wrote my own replacement to the FORTRAN SPURT libraries) and then used a fair bit till about 1990. Fired it up (from the 5 1/4 disks copied some years ago) and had it running in a few minutes, except that it had a range error that I oddly never spotted with Turbo Pascal that had to be fixed first. (And my link with Delphi, applied for a job, didn't get it but they saw Pascal on my resume and said, we'll we've got some Delphi code that needs extending...)

romwell• 7 years ago

No, Delphi back in the day was like VS/C# now... or, rather, the other way around, given that MS snatched Delphi's lead dev* to make C#.

*Anders Hejlsberg -- who also worked to bring us TypeScript.

int_19h9• 7 years ago

C# and Windows Forms was a spiritual successor to Delphi in many ways, IMO. E.g. VCL had TObject <- TComponent <- TControl, WinForms had Object <- Component <- Control ...

gduke4• 7 years ago

You can build native multi-platform apps with Delphi. The free Community Edition supports, Windows, macOS, iOS and Android development. With third party component stacks you can build and transpile Object Pascal to JavaScript with Delphi too.

dfox6• 7 years ago

The article mentions that the binary size of the listbox example is significantly different. Well, we used to say that Delphi 1 is totally wasteful as the default empty project compiled into 39kB .exe, obviously full of bloat ;)

Edit: 39kB was nothing even in the 1995. But there was other more significant issue: if you went for all the database and line of bussines suport libraries you ended up with application that used more 3.5" floppy disks than contemporary Windows 3.1, one for your application and 7 additional for the redistribuable frameworks ;)

userbinator2• 7 years ago

140KB+ for that simple app even in 1995 would've been an insane level of bloat, considering that the Windows 3.1 Program Manager (PROGMAN.EXE) also shown in the screenshots is only 112KB, and it certainly has much more functionality. The File Manager, WINFILE.EXE, is 167KB. As an experienced native Win32 programmer, the same thing in pure Win32 would be <2KB. (Edit: I mean the app with 3 controls on a dialog, not the File Manager...)

What's even more disturbing is the fact that an app which does the same thing in 2019, using a newer version of the programming environment, now takes nearly 6MB or 30MB, depending on which field of the newer versions' dialog you're looking at ("code size" or "file size").

My first experience with a Delphi application was similarly disappointing: I distinctly remember a 300KB binary whose only function was drawing a few lines on the screen (to act as a ruler), and disassembling it in an attempt to figure out why.

nolok• 7 years ago

You don't need to disassemble it, just check the box so that the VCL libraries are loaded dynamically rather than statically linked in the binaries and you get your answer.

There is a reason your app starts at 30 MB and then after you add dozens of forms, database calls, ..., it's still at pretty much the same size, it's the VCL (Delphi's library).

int_19h9• 7 years ago

300 Kb was basically the fixed-size overhead for any VCL app.

But by late 90s, it was "good enough", and that's when Delphi was at peak popularity.

pjmlp9• 7 years ago

Now compare Delphi in 1995 with Electron in 2019....

marcocantu5• 7 years ago

Well notice that info is for application with DEBUG information, not release...

systems• 7 years ago

Embarcadero tools and ides, are super expensive considering that most developer tools are either free (visual studio developer is free for individuals), or way cheaper (jetbrains)

I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following

Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive

Free-pascal is cute and probably productive, but there are way more intellectually and technically interesting options, even tcl/tk in my opinion is better intellectual and technical investment of time compare to free-pascal

teilo• 7 years ago

Looking at their price / feature matrix, they are running this platform like it's still 1999. The cheapest option is outrageous, and has no client/server DB support. So that means spending at least $3,600 (on sale!) for a usable development platform. Batshit crazy.

decebalus1• 7 years ago

You're not the market for these tools. There are loads of enterprise systems built on top of this which need development and yes, they're still bought and sold like it's 1999. A lot of enterprise systems haven't been 'disrupted' yet and as long as Embarcadero is kicking then there is still a market for them. Oh, you've got this early 2000's system written in Delphi which you need to continue supporting, way too expensive to rewrite (think of the auditing and the requirement gathering, oh my.. this is gonna take years!) and now it needs to run on the latest version of Windows because of security constraints? Yup, you pay top dollar for that.

kristianp• 7 years ago

It does seem strange in this day of cloud databases and connected everything, to differentiate their "Enterprise" product based on local vs remote databases[1]. A very outdated way to do things. I think Delphi has had that model since the 90s. On the other hand, they now have a Community edition that is free until your company reaches $5k in revenue.

[1] See: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions

4thaccount• 7 years ago

It is expensive, but you're being overly critical I think. There are a lot of paid tools in the $1500 - $5000 range just for a single user and some cost even more for deployment. If it had cost $10k I would call it insane, but $3,600 isn't too crazy.

lonk• 7 years ago

I suggest you to have a look visual studio pricing: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing/

$5999 first year, $2569/yr renewal

dfox6• 7 years ago

Few years ago they obviously realized this and created free of charge "community" edition (IIRC it is licensed in the "it's free unless you make more than X with this" way, like Unreal Engine).

The target customers for the paid editions obviously are developers of custom line of bussines applications. And in that case the license cost is somewhat justified, as the IDE and it's libraries are essentially directly usable for that, while everyone developing similar things in notionally free of charge Visual Studio is going to buy DevExpress and ReSharper.

acqq• 7 years ago

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

"If you're a small company or organization without revenue (or up to $5,000 per year in revenue), you can also use the Delphi Community Edition. Once your company's total revenue reaches US $5,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, you can move up to an unrestricted commercial license with Professional edition."

emmanueloga_• 7 years ago

Here's another intriguing compiler suite I came across in the past [1].

For both elements, embarcadero and freepascal the promise of easy cross compilation is the most attractive feature in my eyes.

I started programming in Turbo Pascal 20 years ago or so, but I don't know... coming back to the language these days doesn't sound like the most efficient use of my time.

1: https://www.elementscompiler.com/elements/oxygene/

int_19h9• 7 years ago

FPC is far better at it, though, given how many platforms and architectures it supports.

john_moscow• 7 years ago

Most of their target audience is stuck maintaining a legacy system developed decades ago and will happily pay the premium as long as it's cheaper than rewriting everything using a modern stack.

andrewwharton2• 7 years ago

We're in the process of migrating off a 4+ million line Delphi application that basically runs the whole business, but it's a 10+ year project to "grind the monolith", so who knows when we'll actually be done. In the meantime, we don't have much choice but to keep paying the licensing costs...

pjmlp9• 7 years ago

Their target customers are enterprises, the ones that pay for their tools.

Embarcadero prices aren't much different from DB2, Oracle, Visual Studio Ultimate.

mhd2• 7 years ago

Most Delphi software I've seen was more a replacement for Clipper than IBM/Oracle-grade Fortune 500 stuff. One step above Access. Heck, it seems to have kept Firebird alive.

And in turn, you get a lot of job offers rewriting Delphi software in C#.

reinhardt1053• 7 years ago

I find free-pascal to be an intellectually and technically interesting option. It's not new and shiny that's why it's not compelling to many people.

mhd2• 7 years ago

Isn't this more an Idera issue? Buying up somewhat entrenched properties, outsourcing development, the squeezing for what it's worth.

Same happened to ExtJs.

Kinda weird for Delphi, as it wasn't really enterprise software during its heyday, but very popular for mid-sided businesses.

antaviana• 7 years ago

I remember reading that a former Borland or Embacadero CEO said that he absolutely preferred having 99 $1M customers that 1M $99 customers.

I think that enterprise-first strategy has dried up any chances for a community to exist.

We use primarily use Delphi for productivity reasons and think that unless they change their go to market approach, chances of a community reappearing are low.

Perhaps after they have already completed milking enterprise customers, they try to switch to a model of $99/year subscription-only model with a single high quality IDE product and then a community suddenly reappears.

larrywright• 7 years ago

I remember you could always tell apps that were written in Delphi by the non-standard Ok/Cancel buttons with the icons.

currysausage• 7 years ago

And the mouse pointer when hovering hyperlinks was super-weird!

dfox6• 7 years ago

TBitBtn ;)

In fact in Windows 95 and everything after it simply looks totaly out of place and the Delphi documentation tried hard to dissuade people from using that and instead presented some idea of what MS's HIG say (notice that Delphi 2 does not use TBitBtn anywhere and tries to match W95 UI style very hard, even more than Office 95), obviously for a long time it didn't really work.

int_19h9• 7 years ago

This even predated VCL and Delphi. Remember OWL in Borland Pascal?

https://i.imgur.com/esNFWJB.png

pjmlp9• 7 years ago

Which was something that had to be explicitly enabled actually.

hvs• 7 years ago

Back in the late 90's this was my favorite development environment. Still have fond memories of it. Back when "Rapid Application Development" was the buzzword of the day, it actually delivered.

slowmovintarget• 7 years ago

I cut my teeth on Delphi 1.0. Got tons of mileage out of Delphi 2 & 3. Delphi 5 Enterprise was the last IDE I paid for out of my own pocket ($2000!).

I missed it terribly when I moved on to Java (getters and setters?!? the horror!). I can't imagine going back now, though. Java is mostly a memory. Javascript, Clojure, and Rust in programmer's editors are enough.

sys_64738• 7 years ago

Delphi was the Power Builder killer way back 20 years ago.

anotherevan3• 7 years ago

Bloody hell. I've developed with both of these. And Borland C++ Builder.

gumbi_nz• 7 years ago

Anyone remember Borland C++ Builder? I migrated away from Delphi to C++ Builder as soon as it came out. It still used DCUs tho from memory. Thems were the days

anotherevan3• 7 years ago

I still have a non-trivial internal company application written in BCB that requires the occasional bit of maintenance!

pjmlp9• 7 years ago

Yes, for a while I thought that XAML with C++/CX made Visual C++ finally visual and catching up with C++ Builder, but was wrong.

zerr• 7 years ago

Yes, I still remember the emotions I had when I accidentally saw the screenshot of BCB. It was a relieve that I won't need to use that ugly language for RAD GUI dev. I've uninstalled Delphi right away :)

SteveMoody73• 7 years ago

I remember the painfully long compile times. Delphi compiled in seconds where a medium sized C++ app we developed would take about 20 minutes for a build.

mises2• 7 years ago

What's today's equivalent? Something that can produce native binaries for at least windows, mac, linux? The one I see pushed a lot is electron, and there are some cool ideas, but nothing stable that I know of.

rpeden• 7 years ago

Qt and Lazarus are fairly equivalent to Delphi and can generate binaries for all of the platforms you mentioned.

haolez• 7 years ago

Qt Creator is not on par with Delphi’s IDE, although I would Qt on new projects.

SyneRyder2• 7 years ago

Xojo is worth a look. It has the RAD visual form designer approach of Delphi, is a Basic-like language (it used to be called REALbasic & pitched itself as cross-platform Visual Basic), and makes Windows, Mac, Linux & Raspberry Pi binaries. It can also build for iOS, some weird Web deployment that I've never tried, and Android is in the works. There's a plugin architecture like Delphi had & ways to drop down to native APIs if something isn't supported.

The IDE is best on Mac though. The Windows IDE works, but it feels like the developers are probably all on Macs & not really dogfooding the Windows version as much.

[1] https://www.xojo.com/

mises2• 7 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation. Looks like it has a similar pricing model to Delphi, too.

gduke4• 7 years ago

Delphi can produce native binaries for the major platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux (Currently Enterprise version only, requires third party library for GUI), Android, iOS. The free Community Edition supports the platforms above, minus Linux.

markbnj• 7 years ago

I'm amazed about once every three years when I hear or read something that reminds me delphi is still around. For nostalgia's sake, here's a link to the pre-release review of Delphi 95 that I wrote for Dr. Dobb's back in the day: http://www.drdobbs.com/a-quick-look-at-borlands-delphi-95/18.... Doesn't seem like such a quick look now, but articles were longer back then :).

marcocantu5• 7 years ago

Nice review ;-) I think I read it, back then

mb_72• 7 years ago

I, like many others, loved and used Delphi a lot in the 90s, but for one major client we identified a major risk was the declining availability of Delphi developers (in Australia, at least), and I did a rewrite of the entire app into C#, splitting off the calculation part (it being a financial application) into a separate 'core' which is now re-usable across Windows, MacOS and web. At the time we did this it wasn't even clear if Delphi the product was going to survive. I'm glad it has, but the rewrite was the correct decision (yes, as risky as rewrites can be).

richard_todd• 7 years ago

It’s weird that the project options dialog still offers to work around the Pentium FDIV bug. Are any of the current compile targets still afflicted? Like, can 2019 Delphi still compile me a win95 pentium binary?

softgrow2• 7 years ago

I found it quite amusing to see that still there too. Unless you have an affected Pentium 100 (or slower) you won't have an issue. A poster on StackOverflow (2014) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24101125/pentium-safe-fd... raises the issue too, arguing it is safer to leave the option in (which is by default off).

m0zg3• 7 years ago

Delphi (and Borland C++ Builder) was a lot of fun back in the day. Linux ecosystem wasn't as mature, and people who insisted on on using the Microsoft toolchain had to deal with some insane bullshit like MFC, ATL/WTL, or bare Win32 API. In the meanwhile, people using Borland stuff were cranking out superior (and faster) apps out of components downloaded online, and using drag&drop. What would take weeks and a lot of head scratching in MFC was like 10 minutes in Delphi, and you _knew_ you got it right. It was RAD if you pardon my pun.

pjmlp9• 7 years ago

And then Borland decided to change business forcing us to deal with MFC.

That whole Inprise adventure was pretty bad.

m0zg3• 7 years ago

And then Hejlsberg left for MS and took his toys with him. WinForms bore more than a passing resemblance to VCL, and C# more than a passing resemblance to Delphi/C++ Builder. Good for MS to recognize true talent when they see it.

Though their current API situation is still a mess: they can't stop screwing with it. But their .NET situation is as good as it's ever been.

anotherevan3• 7 years ago

In 1997 I wrote an application for our state revenue office that helped their customers produce correct pay-roll annual adjustment forms. It was written in Delphi, had to run on Windows 3.1, 95 and NT, and distributed to around 19,000 customers and CPAs on 3.5" diskettes.

Delphi well fit the constraints of the time.

nurettin• 7 years ago

Also related, lazarus 2.0 was recently announced. It even has an online package manager.

http://forum.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?topic=44161.0

jimmcslim• 7 years ago

I get the feeling that, just like cockroaches, Delphi will survive a nuclear apocalpyse...

ak393• 7 years ago

As long as Win32 exists as a supported api from Microsoft, Delphi will survive in that shade. For a long time Borland produced better tooling for dev on Windows than Microsoft did. Eventually Microsoft just poached the best from Borland including Delphi's inventor, Anders Heijlsberg. Anders eventually created Microsoft J++ rebranded to C#. Many don't know this, but a lot of the event, evensinks and visual design architectures found in Delphi are implemented in C# and the .NET apis.

andrewstuart• 7 years ago

Has the Delphi language evolved - i.e. does it use new ideas and has it dropped old ones? Or is that language substantially the same?

Also, why would anyone use Delphi today except for legacy maintenance?

ak393• 7 years ago

There have been a few syntactic enhancements over the last 10 years or so. Generics for example. Recently they have also added inline variable declaration (you don't need to put all vars in a function at the top anymore). But these don't really matter to me so much. I think Emb did this as response to "Oh Delphi language is archaic - Java has this, C# has that ..."

I still use Delphi for new projects by default. Static linking of libraries into one distributable dll or exe makes it very appealing. If I wanted this in another IDE, I'd have to use VC++. Also, Delphi's VCL, a near comprehensive wrapper of Win32 (its true strength) and native support for IDLs like COM makes it easy to roll out working software sooner.

I'm currently writing a natively compiled Excel Addin with heavy use of TThread - a multithreading VCL class for the Windows platform. Lightning fast compile & build speeds will spoil you.

magicalhippo2• 7 years ago

Yes the language has evolved, but due to backwards compatibility not much as been dropped.

New things include operator overloading of records (structs), compile-time generics and closures/anonymous functions.

Using them you can write code that looks quite different from old Turbo Pascal days.

As for why using it except legacy, yeah... tough question. Well if your target is a Win32-only GUI application, then I don't know much that beats the VCL in getting things done. But that's a narrow niche these days.

mastazi• 7 years ago

I remember using Turbo Pascal, basically the predecessor of Delphi. I had tried Amiga Basic before, but this was the first time that I was being helped by a teacher and actually understanding what I was doing, rather than just copying scripts from Amiga Magazine line by line. I was in my first or second year of high school and, IIRC, we had PCs with 486 CPU (Pentium had already launched but it was very expensive). I remember one day a friend of mine came and told me that Intel was going to make a 1Ghz CPU, I didn't believe him. It would take a few more years before I tried the Internet for the first time.

i_don_t_know• 7 years ago

Niklaus Wirth turns 85 today (Feb 15th). Happy Birthday!

lebed2045• 7 years ago

is there something Delphi (I mean RAD IDE) for React? Sorry for stupid question.

Svip3• 7 years ago

For almost 11 years now, I've been working professionally with Delphi. And it would be wrong to say it's been a smooth ride. There's nothing wrong - per say - with Object Pascal. Or rather, it's not worse than C++, but Delphi - i.e. the library and IDE - is what's lacking behind.

It was definitely cutting edge in the mid-90s, but it has not managed to keep with the times. Most Delphi developers rely on Indy, a third party library of various classes, that provide a lot of functionality the base library should have provided. And even Indy isn't that quick at picking up new features as the world moves on.

When Embarcadero took over from Borland around 2009, they clearly tried to move it on a direction that would encourage more developers. They created ways to build your Delphi application for iOS and Android, which was meant to get more people to write Delphi. It didn't, since the IDE still cost over $1,000 a year. I'd imagine the people who used that functionality were those who were already 'stuck' with Delphi.

Indeed, even as one who engages a lot in the Delphi community, mostly through necessity, notice that very few people join the community without having some legacy application to maintain. And the community as a whole is dwindling anyway.

Embarcadero should have focused on core aspects of the language, which they are finally getting around to. You can now declare variables in the middle of function? That's so 21st century! (Although the forward compiler can't figure it out, so you'll see a lot of red lines in your IDE if you do.)

I won't be writing Delphi professionally a lot longer, though. As I am taking a new job this March, where I am moving on to Go. So it's more a bittersweet good bye for me. Because Delphi is frustrating to work with on a daily basis, but there is a lot nice about it.

amenod• 7 years ago

I think the $1000 price tag is totally wrong. I would never pay that kind of money for an IDE unless it was _really_ better than anything else. But this means:

  - the language has huge community (so I'm not stuck with a dying language)
  - it allows me to do anything (huge extensibility)

Unfortunately it is difficult to change the pricing model once you have existing clients. On one hand they are the only ones paying for your development, so you can't lower the price tag. On the other hand building a bigger community takes time, and it won't happen at this price. So unless they become really creative, Delphi won't survice. Pity, I have used it (yeeeears ago) and it was a brilliant product for building UIs, very easy to use and powerful. Haven't seen anything similar since.

Svip3• 7 years ago

The pricing model is the main reason newer people are not getting into Delphi. This is why they tried to lure people with iOS and Android capabilities. But when there are alternatives that are free, why bother?

Yes, Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library, because you cannot afford it, is always going to alienate some people. And it is always going to feel frustrating, when other languages don't have those limitations.

My office only uses the Professional Edition, because we cannot really afford the Enterprise Edition, which means there were some problems we ended up 'inventing ourselves', because they were only available in the Enterprise Edition.

Delphi probably won't survive another decade (in my estimation), but Pascal will live on as FreePascal/Lazarus.

giancarlostoro3• 7 years ago

I mean companies pay that and more to become Microsoft shops, at least before .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, and this isn'. I agree entirely with you. I would love to learn Delphi from a hobbyist perspective, can I get a license for like $299 or around that range? No? Hell why isn't there a freebie edition anymore.

Except, I can get all of Visual Studio for free for Community use, and yet I can't get a completely free edition of Delphi. I think I got a trial, and it failed to compile / run certain projects. It was basically crippleware for me, I couldn't get it to do a damn thing for a number of the projects it generated code for. I will say though, the IDE is fast as hell and it was a very tiny install.

I also would of loved them to have somewhat teamed up with the FPC group to make it so Delphi compiles for Linux in exchange for either monetary support for the FPC group, or enhancements that would make their compiler awesome.

ivanhoe• 7 years ago

I started with Delphi3, worked a lot in Delphi4, and then the version 5 came, but in meantime the web became THE THING, and Delphi didn't really find a fit in that new world of open-source tools and web apps instead of monolith desktop apps. Which is a shame, as in 90s it was the best IDE, with one of the best and most useful help systems I ever used.

dublo7• 7 years ago

I just took a job taking over for a retiring guy in a factory and he wrote everything in vb6 and ladder logic which I swear looks exactly like Delphi. Ladder logic itself is annoying as hell to work with but I do like the little bits of Delphi mixed in for the complicated math stuff.

The other guy wrote everything in gcode macros using notepad.

Lots of memories though. Giant Enterprise applications we created 20 years ago.

Have to admit I really prefer go and rust and python though. I think I still have all those Dr Dobbs in my basement too. :)

surlyville• 7 years ago

For almost 11 years I worked professionally with Delphi (2-6) before retiring from programming completely in 2006. Then in 2019 I'm back modifying some Delphi programs (microservices against Oracle DB) that I wrote over 15 years ago...and using Delphi 6! Of course, the long term plan is to rewrite in .NET but luckily domain knowledge is worth more.

ezconnect• 7 years ago

Delphi made me lots of applications and money. It was a great tool when it first came out.

martin_a• 7 years ago

Wow. Delphi.

It was probably the first tool/language I got in contact with while in school. I didn't had any idea what I was doing, playing around with the parallel port trying to read sensor data for a school project.

I think I ended with Delphi 7, most probably some pirated copy of the Professional version, to have all those fancy libraries where I had no idea what to do with.

Wondering whether I should get into it for the sake of the old times. :-)

agent008t• 7 years ago

Delphi was a great way to get into programming as a kid. You could just drop an image and a timer onto a form, set it to 50ms, edit the onElapse event to move the image according to key-presses, and you've got the start of a simple game! All in a way that is visual and makes intuitive sense to any non-programmer.

And the beauty of the language/IDE was that you could develop serious, complex applications with it, too.

Is there anything similar on the market today? I had a ton of fun with Delphi as a teenager!

fmxexpress5• 7 years ago

There are lots of drag and drop tools on the market. Why not just download the Delphi Community Edition for your hobby projects though? It's free.

chadcmulligan• 7 years ago

I've been a Delphi developer off and on for 20+ years (since 2, though dabbled with 1). A lot of people focus on the object pascal and it is dated as a language, though the latest is catching up. The IDE has problems now and then with code completion - it pauses a lot and sometimes just stops working, if you come from Visual Studio or XCode this is incomprehensible and annoying.

Where Delphi shines is the VCL - the Visual Component Library and the third party component market. You can integrate components into the IDE by writing them in pascal. Even now there are still lots of components for pretty well anything - even web development.

It also has cross platform components that you can run on iOS/Android/Mac and Windows (edit: theres also a server side linux one) all with the same code, they are compiled to native and if you want you can write native components on all these platforms.

A lot of windows C# components available for sale are actually written in Delphi

You can connect to databases using components, I've written native socket servers by just dragging a couple of components on to a form. For writing business apps there is nothing superior imho

There are components for web development where you can write an SPA all in Pascal and use components

There's a free community edition available now https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter so if you've never looked at Delphi have a look.

cmroanirgo2• 7 years ago

The last time I was seriously using object Pascal was in the Turbo Pascal days. Even after all this time, it's had a warm place in my heart, despite myriad languages beneath my belt.

It's great that there's community edition for Delphi now. Thanks for the link!

FranciscusG2• 7 years ago

Delphi shines in so many ways - I tried to develop something in Go but I hit a brick wall with a sub-par editor (Visual Studio Code), all kinds of restrictions, no way to make halfway acceptable GUI apps, a slow runtime, a slow compiler, unacceptable formatting rules, totally hopeless. Rust has even worse issues. I considered C, C++, Java and PHP 7.3 but I'm basically forced into using Delphi again for a new major project.

I'd rather not use Delphi, since it's hard to find developers for it and investors won't like it. But there just aren't better or even acceptable alternatives for the type of development I do (3rd wave AI, building a graph database from scratch, processing TB's of data, dynamic visualisations etc.)

So the plan is to build all this unique functionality with Delphi and then, when I have something sellable, perhaps get it rewritten in Rust or something, when those tools have become better.

Even though I'm an old fogie and highly experienced with Delphi, I also do embedded dev. in C and have done so for decades, plus I recently built an enterprise-level PHP online store from scratch. I've been a vocal critic of Delphi for decades as well (even banned on Embarcadero's forums) and in 2019, I do not know of anything that compares to Delphi...

magicalhippo2• 7 years ago

hard to find developers for it

Our last two hires were guys without any prior Delphi experience. They did have Java, C++, Python etc background, tho. We sent them off to a two day intro course and with some assistance they were doing useful work within a couple of weeks.

A small investment IMO if you plan on keeping your employees for a while...

cmroanirgo2• 7 years ago

An update to the 'free community edition':

You absolutely MUST click on "I agree to receive Embarcadero marketing communications via email and phone call" before being able to download it. How is this compliant with GDPR? I also notice that if you change countries, the whole form to be filled out also changes (but the above stipulation remains).

Then there's also:

Licenses are valid for a one-year term subject to the revenue restrictions.

This is definitely the least 'community oriented' product Ive ever encountered!

I'm sorry, but companies doing stunts like this simply cannot be trusted. It's a shame, because I really did want to consider rekindling my love of development in Pascal, but dealing with a company like this is an utter deal breaker. The sad thing is that it's most likely the marketing people in that company that are pushing for this... and I'm sure the developers there would love to have an open community edition, unlike what is actually being presented.

robocat• 7 years ago

We use Delphi, because we are productive with it, but it is seriously sorry.

Yes, you can develop 64 bit apps with it, but the IDE is still a 32 bit app, which causes problems with large projects.

The Indy components (e.g. http) are unsafe and shitty.

Personally I don't think there is much to recommend.

cannam• 7 years ago

the IDE is still a 32 bit app

So is Visual Studio, for what it's worth.

gduke4• 7 years ago

You don't necessarily have to use Indy. There are several open source and commercial network stacks available for Delphi that works across supported platforms.

Also, since Delphi XE8, components for proper HTTP handling, that taps into the host platforms native implementation, has been available. They work really great.

gattilorenz• 7 years ago

Marco Cantu's (the author of this blog) books on Delphi are/were a great resource for learning the language.

Btw, his website is under heavy load right now (probably the HN hug?), and this is the error I got:

Error in page: /blog/2019-february-24-years-delphi.html

Error Class: EListError

Error Message: List index out of bounds (-1)

Suggesting that the webserver is written in Delphi... that's dedication :)

marcocantu5• 7 years ago

Sorry, my blog has some issues keeping up with heavy load... I've restarted it and will be monitoring it. I should have imagined, my bad.

cubano2• 7 years ago

Wow..that error message is an ultimate blast-from-the-past.

How appropo it's a website that's throwing it now.

philpem3• 7 years ago

I have so many fond memories of putting together quick apps with Delphi "back in the day". Every now and again I'd buy a copy of PC Plus magazine just because they had Delphi 1, 2 or 3 on the cover CD.

I really miss the RAD concept, and I'd love to find a modern tool which had that aspect of Delphi, though perhaps with C++ or Python as a backing language.

I know there's Lazarus (opensource Delphi), but it's C++Builder I miss... wxWidgets is close, but not quite the nice quickly-have-something-presentable environment I remember.

Throwing the cat among the pigeons... does anyone remember Kylix?

askvictor• 7 years ago

Anvil (http://anvil.works) is the closest thing I've come across to Delphi in the modern age. It's python, and it's webapps, but it's stupidly quick and easy (and fun) to get something working.

philpem3• 7 years ago

I've actually found the combination of Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy and Bootstrap really good for throwing together quick web-apps.

I usually use wxWidgets (well, wxPython) for the desktop stuff, but I wondered if there was a better way. It just doesn't feel quite as smooth and polished as Delphi/C++Builder/Kylix were.

sifoobar• 7 years ago

I started working professionally in Delphi around 1998, and then spent 13 years evolving and maintaining a sprawling 2+ mloc reservation system.

They had a great thing going around that time, but then the pivoting and squeezing started. Instead of evolution we got enterprices, buzzwords and bit rot. By Delphi7, I'd say it was already as good as dead.

All owners so far share an unfortunate tendency to oversell half-baked solutions with no future, all the way up until the point where they pivot and push a brand new successor with no future while deprecating the previous attempt asap.

Their database, Interbase; was open source for about a month. Until the suits realized that no one would buy their shiny enterprice crap if they could simply download it for free, and it was closed again asap. Only now all the people who knew anything had joined effort in a fork called FirebirdSQL.

It was even released for Linux under the name Kylix, free for non-commercial use if I remember correctly. Until Microsoft bullied them into dropping the cross-platform game right now in return for cozy time with the centerfold creep and his side kick sweaty monkey. I just threw up a little in my mouth writing that so I'll stop here.

pkphilip3• 7 years ago

This. I completely agree. Delphi was killed by the suits who suddenly jumped onto the Application Lifecycle management fad. Sad.

gg82• 7 years ago

In Australia we have the Australian Delphi Users Group. We are having a conference next month.

https://www.adug.org.au/meetings/symposiums/2019-symposium/

It will have a range of topics including showing how to borrow some techniques from other languages and showing how to use some of the new functionality in the latest releases.

Leace• 7 years ago

Delphi was my first exposure to a real programming language almost 20 years ago. I'm very glad that it was it as I look upon the landscape of software engineering nowadays and it's totally opaque to beginners.

Delphi has right abstractions in a right place - you designed the form in a easy GUI and filled in methods with your code [0].

Why it was that way? Because it was designed to be simple and it worked (no need for Bret Victor's magic). (There was a blog of former Delphi developer that explained their thought process)

For the record I worked professionally in JavaScript (TypeScript) (backend and frontend), Java (Kotlin), C# and Ruby. I also did small chunks of support code in C/C++, Rust, Red/Rebol, Python, PHP, Go, Prolog and Lua.

If I wanted to teach kids programming today, something easy to understand but at the same sufficiently complex I'd probably choose Delphi (Lazarus looks like Delphi 5/7 from screenshots).

[0]: manual memory management was harder than GC but on the other hand it thought a lesson...

cubano2• 7 years ago

What I remember most fondly about the Borland stack was how well it abstracted away all the messy Windows 3.x and 95 UI code and made working professionally as a Windows dev much less stressful.

Also, for a time, it totally blew away MS Visual C, although the VCL was hella inconsistent, and that was rather maddening at times.

To be at max productivity you had to scour the web looking for snippets that showed you how to, say, add strings to this widget or draw on that canvas.

The RAD implementation was rather brilliant, and for several years at least blew its main competitor, Visual Basic (ugh) totally out of the water.

alexeykovyazin• 7 years ago

Delphi is still the best choice for SQL driven apps

xxxxxxxx• 7 years ago

Any mention of Delphi always brings back fond memories of my first job. We were doing amazing things with Clipper at the time, with a bit of Turbo Pascal on the side. Then windows took root and the world opened up with promises from Visual Objects and Dephi - but VB ended up the winner and that was the end of that.

We would play with Delphi and SmallTalk just for fun and there was always a Dephi fanboi around.

Despite these 'primitive' tools we were so much more productive back then - it's quite sad where we have ended up. We would pump out wonderful apps even in the days before we could get our hands on a relational database. dBase files, VSAM files and even trusty CODASYL did the job without any fuss.

vram22• 7 years ago

There was this good thread about Delphi on HN some years ago:

Delphi – why won't it die? (2013) (stevepeacocke.blogspot.com)

http://stevepeacocke.blogspot.com/2013/05/delphi-why-wont-it...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543

Narishma• 7 years ago

I don't know if it's just me but what I noticed right away in those screenshots is that the older Windows 3.1 interface is much easier on the eye that the modern one. You can easily tell what's clickable and what's not, the contrast is good, the fonts and colors are consistent. All that while using a fraction of the resources.

orzig• 7 years ago

Related: Does anyone else remember the "How to use a mouse" programs on early Macs?

https://gizmodo.com/heres-how-a-macintosh-tutorial-taught-pe...

daaharper• 7 years ago

I'd pick Delphi over WPF/Winforms any day. Better cross-platform options, vector-based graphics via FMX, or traditional Windows graphics via the VCL. COM programming couldn't be easier. Performance is good, lots of components readily available, and finally Object Pascal is a joy to program in. Compilation speed comparable to a C# build.

sinuhe69• 7 years ago

Nobody mentioned the form inheritance feature of the VCL, the consequent applying of OOP principles for UI. Because all interface elements are implemented as (object) components, in Delphi, you can easily group an arbitrary assembly of UI elements in a frame object and make it readily available as a new “component” for reuse; a great way to reuse standard design in big commercial applications. Another way of accelerating the production is to design similar screens as subclasses of a common screen. You can pack then all the common functionality in the ancestor screen and don’t waste time to copy-paste or worrying about error propagation. Of course, one can group common functionality in classes or procedures but UI functionality is very often bound to a certain UI element and not generic. Thus form inheritance is much more efficient than the (otherwise) standard practice. I designed once an application for museum management with a lot of different working screens but they are similar in some functionality. Using form inheritance I could avoid designing big generic working screens, which could be very confusing and annoying for the users, but offer instead specific screens for specific tasks and still saving a lot of time (and debugging headache). I estimate using form inheritance in Delphi helped me at the time to increase the productivity of the UI implementation phase up to the factor of 5! I guess other systems could do similar things but not as elegant as Delphi though. In term of desktop applications, I believe none other can be as productive as Delphi.

pjmlp9• 7 years ago

Windows Forms inherited this concept given Anders. :)

unnouinceput• 7 years ago

Reading through the comments and as a 20+ years developer, using mainly Delphi, and with past 10 years as freelancer exclusively using only Delphi I realize people here don't actually understand what this IDE is doing. So here are a few points:

a - About dying and used only for legacy projects. Well, when a company wants something fast to win their customers hearts and push through next phase of moneygrabbing, do you think they care about latest technologies? Dirty Delphi does the job in 5 hours, what in others takes days if not weeks.

b - price too high. Correct, it is. But when you fly your technicians across entire continental US to deal with a hardware problem at one of your venues do you think 5k USD/year is much? That's pocket change.

c - Younger developers do not learn it. Well, younger developers should not learn anything but only one language for at least 3 years, ideally while still in college, and absorb instead algorithms/paradigms/math - skills more valuable then a computer language syntax. Once you master those and a language, no matter what, the entirety of the rest of languages are nothing more then syntax equivalent. Hence grabbing Delphi should be a maximum 3 weeks venture, after that I'd expect that young developer to be able to solve problems. I did just that, with Pascal in my beginnings and over the years/companies I've worked for I learned Java/C/C++/PHP/ASM/VB/ASP/ etc etc. Knowing how to implement quicksort in Pascal is the same as in C++, it's a syntax equivalent, nothing more.

d - Many comments about native - this is a type of comment from proponents. Well, in my experience that nativity was such a hassle for me that I'd rather go away with it and used Dalvik/the new ART instead in case of Android, but it is what it is.

Feel free to AMA.

24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

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