Delphi 11 Alexandria

https://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2021-september-delphi-11-released.html

by mariuz • 5 years ago

150 121 5 years ago

blog.marcocantu.com

mobilio2• 5 years ago

Mine last Delphi was 7... greatest release!

petepete• 5 years ago

I still miss Delphi from time to time. I started with 5 and used both 6 and 7 before leaving for greener pastures. I've never used anything as productive for creating Windows applications, it was just a joy to use (in 2001-2004).

dagw• 5 years ago

It's kind of sad that an IDE from 2002 is the pinnacle of ease of use and productivity when it comes quickly and efficiently creating GUI applications.

FpUser5• 5 years ago

For inexplicable reasons well beyond my understanding mainstream development had always gone into the most masochistic state.

mhd5• 5 years ago

Now talk to some Smalltalk developers...

askvictor• 5 years ago

I usually mention this when Delphi pops up on HN - anvil.works comes close to re-creating that ease of use and productivity, but for web-apps, and in Python.

praptak• 5 years ago

Dunno, my gut feeling is that the decline started somewhere after Delphi 5.

I haven't really used 6 but my transition from 5 to 7 was a bit crappy. I remember that Delphi 7 added lots of bells and whistles but had more cluttered UI and worse stability than 5.

Most probably because 7 was supposed to be the big entry of Delphi into the web app market, which resulted in a product with felt rushed and half-baked.

wruza2• 5 years ago

Idk, I remember some good things that I was surely missing in 5, and little less in 6. Upgrades were a little bumpy, but after that phase it all felt much better.

wruza2• 5 years ago

I pretend to think that it was actually the final, complete release.

jhgb• 5 years ago

I mean, the number 7 means perfection to some people, right?

nobleach• 5 years ago

Same here. It was an era where the company I worked for was looking to transition to web. The web was NOWHERE near ready for a desktop-app like experience. Especially since the RAD crowd (VB, Delphi, etc) expected to drag and drop components on a canvas and wire them up in code. We saw that as the holy grail. Delphi apps were promoting a "briefcase model" client/server architecture. And we were sort leveraging that for salespeople in the field. They'd go out, do their work, and then get online to sync data when they could. The idea that they could just hit a web page and do up to the minute transactions over a dial-up internet connection was the new "holy grail".

Moving to the web meant Perl:DBI, then Python/MySQL, then finally PHP4.

I'll always have such a soft spot for those Delphi days though. Kylix too!

nly5• 5 years ago

20 years ago, when I was in college, I remember being super relieved that our Comp Sci course tutor wanted us to use Delphi/Pascal instead of VB.

At the beginning of the course, the tutor asked us all what other languages the class had experience with already. Being smug, I said I had used C++ and he then sarcastically announced to the rest of the class how they were all unworthy to be in my presence.

I really enjoyed Delphi. Those T prefixes still evoke nostalgia for Delphi 6 and 7, just before Borland went all-in on .NET and ruined the IDE.

Now that Qt is becoming more and more hostile, perhaps Delphi shouldn't be overlooked so easily for writing cross-platform desktop software... although it seems there's still no Linux support in the free edition.

squarefoot2• 5 years ago

Now that Qt is becoming more and more hostile

Can you please elaborate on that? I thought the free edition of Qt was open enough to be the right choice for writing fast multiplatform code. Did they change anything wrt licensing, or there are technical issues?

although it seems there's still no Linux support in the free edition.

And the insane price tag of the other editions wouldn't help either. Anyway, Lazarus may be far from being the same thing feature-wise, still it's worth of consideration for Linux development. https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Kliment4• 5 years ago

Qt's corporate owners have been openly hostile to the community for a while, and have been trying to get away with shady stuff. The license terms for commercial use are terrible, you need an active license to distribute existing software, not only develop new software, the prices are excessive and keep increasing, and once you get a commercial use license you have to keep it forever or you won't be able to distribute your existing work. Commercial license users are prohibited from contributing to the community version. They also made registration mandatory for all downloads, even of the GPL/LGPL licensed stuff, which information they use for Oracle-style license shakedowns. They keep delaying GPL/LGPL releases and have stated an intention to delay them by the maximum permitted amount (one year) meaning all community contributions are effectively blocked because contributors don't have access to the current codebase. While the contract with the Qt community does prevent the Qt Company from going completely closed, they're certainly not someone I'm comfortable with.

vetinari• 5 years ago

Can you please elaborate on that? I thought the free edition of Qt was open enough to be the right choice for writing fast multiplatform code. Did they change anything wrt licensing, or there are technical issues?

The minor releases are free only until next major one is out. After that, further minor releases are proprietary-only. I.e. that means right now, no free updates to 5.x anymore, if you want maintained release, only 6.0 is an option.

nottorp• 5 years ago

Can you please elaborate on that? I thought the free edition of Qt was open enough to be the right choice for writing fast multiplatform code. Did they change anything wrt licensing, or there are technical issues?

I believe it still is, as long as you can afford to have a law firm on retainer :)

Same for Delphi TBH. Two great products, dead.

rob743• 5 years ago

There is Lazarus, which is an open source Delphi clone based on Free Pascal. Haven't tried it yet though. But the file manager I use daily (https://github.com/doublecmd/doublecmd) is written in it, and I have some ideas for improving it, so maybe I will try to compile that project for good old time's sake...

meibo• 5 years ago

For anyone that's curious, popular game hacking/reverse engineering tool Cheat Engine(basically a fully fledged Windows debugger nowadays) is also made in Lazarus - though I can't seem to come up with anything else that is from the top of my head.

chadcmulligan• 5 years ago

just before Borland went all-in on .NET and ruined the IDE.

That was when it went off the rails and never recovered imho, others are mentioning Borlands business practices which were not the best at the time. Technically it lost direction as well, it never developed a response to Java, .Net and the web, and still doesn't, though you can actually develop web applications with Delphi to, with 3rd party components and they work very well.

mrtksn• 5 years ago

Anyone well versed on the current situation with Delphi? Is it still a thing? Is it any good? According to the promotional material on their website, Delphi RAD Studio is supposed to be the holly grail of cross platform application development(Apparently they support iOS,Android,Linux, Windows, MacOS including Apple M1).

For most people though, including me, Delphi seems to be something nostalgic. Good old days, the first time I built applications in high school until I get reliable internet connection and gained my bad coding habits with learning PHP.

I remember building a password manager(stored your passwords in a plain text file hidden deeply in the OS folders structure, had an access counter), a lottery coupon filler(generated printable coupon images so you don't do it with a pen) and a port scanner(the remote address tab was called "far address", because English) and getting them distributed on application download websites.

Kliment4• 5 years ago

Delphi, as technology, is amazing. But the company controlling it operates on the model of locking-in existing customers and ratcheting up prices. It's a bad deal for everyone not already stuck in the ecosystem with things they need to maintain. Look up Lazarus for the open source I-can't-believe-it's-not-Delphi

mobilio2• 5 years ago

Well - once upon a time they WAS amazing.

But later they become CodeGear and later their R&D division is moved to Romania. Products become unstable and unreliable.

57844743385• 5 years ago

Maybe that’s the only viable business model.

lmilcin• 5 years ago

Delphi was my first real programming environment circa 1998.

At least at the time it allowed me to build professionally looking applications with practically nil experience and with little effort.

mhd5• 5 years ago

The company has quite a different focus than Borland of old, which tried to get their products in as many hands as possible. Many a programmer was weaned on a cheap copy of Turbo Pascal or Turbo-C.

Idera, on the other hand, caters to enterprises. I haven't had a deep look at Delphi in recent years, but if it's the same as ExtJs now (another company bought up by them), I don't see it as a viable option, compared to C# for most small business developers who still need to make UI apps (and on the pure hobbyist end, you've got Lazarus).

I leave the language complaints to the Rust brigade.

tssva• 5 years ago

On the hobbyist end there is also the free community edition of Delphi.

speed_spread2• 5 years ago

Funny you left the complaints to the brigade. I actually found in Rust what I had been missing from Pascal since my Delphi years: a sane, structured system programming language.

Having a Delphi equivalent for Rust would be a dream. The build times are never going to match Pascal's single pass compiler, though.

shimonabi2• 5 years ago

I currently work with a licensed C++ Builder, which uses Delphi libraries.

Because of lackluster examples of C++ code, I have to look through Delphi code several times a day on the internet and when I'm debugging.

rob743• 5 years ago

I guess when you use RAD Studio, it's probably better to go "all in" and use the Delphi language too. I tried C++ Builder once while I was working with Delphi, hoping it will be faster than Visual C++. Little did I know that the slow compile times are "baked in" into C/C++ family languages in ways that are hard to get around, so I was disappointed and went right back to Delphi. The Delphi language is (conceptually, not syntactically) not that different from other classical OO languages like C++ or Java, although it (thankfully in my opinion) doesn't have as many bells and whistles. But of course if you have lots of legacy code in C++ Builder, switching is probably not an option...

password4321• 5 years ago

Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28490736

2021-09-11 73 points | 163 comments

coliveira6• 5 years ago

Unfair competition from Microsoft, that's it.

lelanthran• 5 years ago

Apparently they support iOS,Android,Linux, Windows, MacOS including Apple M1

Last I checked two weeks ago there was no Linux support. I still don't see any mention of Linux support.

vintagedave• 5 years ago

Delphi does support Linux: https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Sydney/en/Linux_Ap...

It was initially aimed at server-side apps. Despite what the doc there says, you can also create UI apps through FMXLinux, an addon made available along with Delphi when you buy it.

wila2• 5 years ago

It's there, but you need an enterprise license...

wila2• 5 years ago

Sure, it still is a thing.

They can't keep on releasing new versions if nobody is using it :) I use it and stay up-to-date via their subscriptions.

Is it good? Well.. the old VCL stuff is pretty good, very stable, can do pretty much all you want. But that's Windows only.

The multi device framework (FMX aka firemonkey) is getting better, but does sometimes still lack in how mature it is. Normally however you can work around any issue you bump into.

So is it perfect? No, but I'm not aware of a tool that is perfect when you need cross platform development tools.

As far as cost goes (the main complaint I tend to see), it's not very cheap on initial purchase. But with the subscription you basically have a cost of about $500/year for the professional version. Not insurmountable if you consider that they actively work on improving the language and support.

coliveira6• 5 years ago

Delphi and other Embarcadero products are still a thing. In Brazil, Delphi was the number 1 platform for several years, and there are still companies maintaining products using this technology. It was cheap at the time (compared to MS offerings) and very easy to use. Given the large number of products released with this platform, I imagine they will be able to stay in the market for a long time.

magicalhippo• 5 years ago

We use Delphi to develop and maintain a large Windows desktop application.

For that I think it's still pretty darn good.

I recently made a new module for our program, with ~300 input fields including custom search inputs, several grids and multiple 3-layer deep details (head-detail-subdetail). I got the UI elements down in less than two days, and had the whole module ready for initial testing in a less than a month, UI to DB.

This included a lot of smarts, overview/selection views and other custom dialogs, as well as configurable UI defaults like tabstops, required fields, field colors and default values which vary based on current process (think invoice vs credit note).

So yeah, for that kinda stuff it's still pretty great I think. You might want to buy some components, but Delphi itself is expensive so that shouldn't be a huge issue.

For the other platforms I'm less sold.

I've tried FireMonkey, which is their cross-platform UI framework, and it was tedious and the code did not fill me with confidence (3D math library was mixing various concepts etc). They've had some years to work on it since then, maybe things have improved. But you're forever stuck with non-native on all platforms.

The key issue for me is that if you're planning on writing an application with an expected lifetime of 10+ years, like we are, I feel uncomfortable relying on a closed-source tool chain.

Delphi works today, but I don't know where it'll be in 5 years time. I can most likely get it to compile in a VM, worst case, but will it generate the code I need?

KindOne• 5 years ago

Related discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28489516 - "RAD Studio 11 Alexandria" - 11 days ago

rob743• 5 years ago

Ah, yes, news from the Delphi universe...

As a guy who used to work with Delphi professionally until ~10 years ago, I find it fascinating how a development environment can survive for so long while completely flying under the radar. I guess it's mostly legacy applications? I mean, COBOL is considerably older, but still a thing thanks to legacy applications.

mhd5• 5 years ago

Honestly, for these types of applications (small-business/enterprise in-house) I think we're going in a terribly wrong direction, from terminal apps to Windows GUIs to web apps.

The DX might have improved, UX hasn't. First programmer GUIs with too many buttons and widgets, now the Pagemakerization of everything.

So apart from resources, I can understand companies that try to stick with the old.

rimliu• 5 years ago

I think even DX-wise we are painting ourselves into corner. First it is "hey, I know web tech, let's use it for anything". Then it is "hey, that's a bit complicated, let's make a framework". Then "hey, this framework get heavy, let's make some tooling around it". And then "oh, now I spend 75% of my time fighting with the infrastructure".

pid-1• 5 years ago

My team mostly codes internal apps and I 100% agree.

Most SaaS, cloud providers, new data bases, etc... Target web scale, machine learning powered applications deployed to the edge (plus other buzzwords).

Most offerings that target SMBs are low code soluctions or some other sort of hyper locked-in, inflexible bullshit.

I think there's a set of stuff every business wants nowadays (internal network, internal static pages, internal APIs, internal object store, internal DAG / job runner) and there's money to be made by offering a quick, robust, secure and cost-efficient way of developing and integrating those.

/rant

dadior• 5 years ago

I was using Delphi 5 for years, that's 2001 year, to build a Vehicle annual inspection system

FrankSansC• 5 years ago

Reading about Delphi brings back some fond memories about Delphi 6 and using the JEDI JCL / JVCL and Inno Setup for the installation and upgrade process. Spent a couple of years building a software for editing and synchronizing configuration files (for a specific piece of hardware) with Palm Pilot devices. Good old time.

tragomaskhalos2• 5 years ago

Some observations on Delphi, from someone who briefly used it in the mid-90's (so pre-.NET and all that):

- Its main competitor was of course Visual C++ (and I guess to a lesser extent VB); it never quite gained the traction to supplant these, probably various factors here (explored in other comments);

- Building GUIs was a lot nicer that using Visual C++, which at the time was locked into a weird model whereby there was a wizard to create apps that kind of forced you into its Document-View paradigm - a very specific way of looking at an application that wasn't always applicable (in my experience, in fact, rarely applicable). Delphi just allowed you to build GUIs with windows like a normal person;

- C++ lacked STL at the time, we'd use weird stuff like RogueWave to get even basic things like usable strings, vectors etc; with Delphi this was all built in and it Just Worked in this regard;

- Some lower-level shenanigans were difficult in Delphi, and the community was not much help. For forgotten reasons, I needed an equivalent of offsetof, and only eventually sussed out how to do this;

- Verity Stob was a user (and fan)

It's good to see that it's still going though.

pantulis3• 5 years ago

Ahhhh the Rogue Wave standard libraries! CORBA! The ACE Reactor Library! We had all that in 1998, kiddos.

huhtenberg• 5 years ago

CORBA

Brrrr... /shudders

gonzus• 5 years ago

Kudos for the trip down memory lane regarding ACE. What an amazing library that was. Great abstractions in a language that might have not been 100% ready for them yet...

aortega2• 5 years ago

Its main competitor was of course Visual C++

Visual C++ wasn't visual. Perhaps the main competitor was Visual Basic.

CRConrad• 5 years ago

Visual C++ wasn't visual. Perhaps the main competitor was Visual Basic.

Both. Their slogan at the time was "The ease of Visual Basic with the power of Visual C++!" -- and AFAICS, it was true.

aortega2• 5 years ago

It's kinda sad that Microsoft pawned all Delphi devs to start .NET. It basically killed it, together with c++ builder and all other VCL frameworks.

However, I'm doing a big project using Lazarus and free-pascal (the GPL version of Delphi/VCL), and it's amazing, the IDE has been getting improvements continuously for more than 15 years and now I believe it's better than Delphi, very stable, amazingly fast and also multi-platform.

vladoh• 5 years ago

I have very fond memories of Delphi - it got me into programing and I earned my first money from a job using Delphi. Nowadays, while doing web development I still miss some features. I haven't used Delphi after version 7 (just before the .NET switch).

However, Delphi is still used by some companies! My mother works in a small company developing business software like accounting, payroll, inventory tracking etc. They still used Delphi (I think version 7) and have a small, but thriving business. No incentive to switch...

jqpabc123• 5 years ago

Delphi was nice for building desktop Windows apps.

How many people still do this? Most new work I do is either mobile or web/server.

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

Interesting that there is still a development team working on that product. Also interesting that apparently you can produce android applications with it. Sadly due to the pricing, I doubt many will take this into use for new projects.

The language popup insisting on every page that they've unhelpfully detected my ip address is in Germany is really annoying. It asks on every page load and does not remember anything. I guess there are some dust old developer offices somewhere in Germany still handing over cash to them to maintain decades old enterprise applications.

marcodiego• 5 years ago

I have to repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28491963 :

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 next version: you were imprisoned in an obsolete ide. By not being multi-platform (I hear it improved it lately) you could only use it with/for win32 so it lost servers, embedded and mobile. By not being open-source nobody could improve it.

Then it had to compete with "native tools". Whoever develops for windows wouldn't quit ms' tools to use it, whoever develops for mac wouldn't quit apple's tools to use it, whoever develops for android wouldn't quit google's tools to use it, whoever develops for linux was mostly ignored after kylix.

Note that I didn't even mentioned price and license.

They improved it later, I heard. But seems more like the old case of too little too late. Most successful programming languages today are open source and multi-platform. Delphi was dependent on win32 for too long and it still is "too proprietary". You do the world a favor by porting your project to lazarus.

xony• 5 years ago

borland died .. wasted my 4 years on this product.

criddell• 5 years ago

That's unfortunate.

I started off writing applications with Nantucket's Clipper. That product also died but I look back fondly at the experience because I learned a great deal that I was able to apply to the next thing and the thing after that.

makz• 5 years ago

I have fond memories of Delphi, and it looks like an amazing product, the deal breaker for me is that it runs only in Windows.

adrianlmm• 5 years ago

I've maintained the same Delphi application for 16 years now, made with Delphi 7, and is working 24/7 all the year (no failures, generating about 20,000 db records daily), amazingly only consumes 7mb of ram and is superfast, try doing that with electron.

sinuhe69• 5 years ago

After installing Delphi 10.4 community edition and the license didn't even work, it was the final point for me to say permanent goodbye to the new Delphi.

Lazarus is good enough and the cross-platform promise of Delphi was never truly compelling enough.

davidhbolton• 5 years ago

I'm part of a team that looks after a 1.3 million loc application in Delphi using the XE7 version. The 32-bit version builds in just 11 seconds on an 18 month old laptop.

I've just spent the last two years adding Virtual Channels support to our product. If you're not into COM in C++, Delphi is excellent for this kind of stuff. However the Infosec part of the company hates that we have to have Local Admin access but you can't register/unregister COM objects without it.

Delphi 11 Alexandria

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