Delphi still exists and is actively developed

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

by psim1 • 4 years ago

165 243 4 years ago

jollyllama6• 4 years ago

I remember, as a kid, looking up examples of malware. Bots and trojans and such. Invariably, much of it was in Delphi. Why was this so?

vbezhenar2• 4 years ago

Simple low-level language, high-quality IDE. Why not.

jsmolka• 4 years ago

Calling RAD Studio a high-quality IDE seems like a stretch to me. I would choose VS Code or a JetBrains product any day of the week. Unfortunately you a kinda stuck with it when developing in Delphi.

bikingbismuth• 4 years ago

Not sure why, but when I worked for a large fintech a couple years ago, we regularly saw banking Trojans built in Delphi.

jollyllama6• 4 years ago

Yes, that's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about.

thijsvandien• 4 years ago

Mostly because it builds self-contained executables that are virtually guaranteed to work. Nowadays this is much less of a thing, but we are talking about the day and age of DLL Hell.

optymizer• 4 years ago

At least in the ex-soviet countries, a lot of the legally-questionable software we used to write was in Pascal because that's what we learnt in school. It was an easy transition to go to Delphi - nice RAD IDE for GUI RATs or keygens/cracks, familiar OO language.

jollyllama6• 4 years ago

Makes sense. Thanks.

jhbadger• 4 years ago

Even in the West, Pascal was the standard teaching language even in the late 1980s -- my undergraduate classes and textbooks all used it.

jamal-kumar• 4 years ago

Most Delphi examples I see these days are actually modern, recently written malware samples. It statically compiles into a tiny binary which has a weird ABI which flies under the radar of AV software looking for programs up to no good. What's not to love for this purpose if you are an adversarial actor?

The vega/buran strain of ransomware malware comes to mind as a well known example from the past few years [1]

[1] https://www.acronis.com/en-us/blog/posts/meet-buran-new-delp...

CRConrad13• 4 years ago

Most Delphi examples I see these days are actually modern, recently written malware samples. It statically compiles into a tiny binary which has a weird ABI which flies under the radar of AV software looking for programs up to no good. What's not to love for this purpose if you are an adversarial actor?

And recently lots of malware detection has started looking for that "weird" ABI signature, so now everyone's anti-virus is throwing up alarms at perfectly legit age-old software just because it's built with Delphi.

mikewarot2• 4 years ago

I miss Delphi.... even though I've got it installed.

I can't bring myself to use it.

The "free" version has a hook in it that just doesn't sit well with me... they want a cut of any money I make with it, on their terms. It's easier for me to ignore it, and just put up with the limited documentation of Lazarus. I miss the days when I could afford Delphi.

proxysna• 4 years ago

Use Lazarus. Free and Opensource clone of Delphi

kerblang• 4 years ago

I used Delphi years and years ago and it was great for building GUI applications quickly and easily. Much nicer than Visual Basic. I probably wouldn't recognize it now, other than I suppose it's still Object Pascal, which is a very good programming language, all things considered; straightforward, not too fancy, not too dumbed down.

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

KindOne3• 4 years ago

Be warned: You need to enter a valid phone number. They will call you asking on what you plan on building with the software. I've had that happen to me within a few days of downloading the software.

Another person had the same experience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582890

martin_a• 4 years ago

Could you accidentally mistype the phone number or do you need it for something?

ChildOfChaos• 4 years ago

Why would you ever put in your real phone number anyway?

copperx• 4 years ago

I hang up on people all the time. I don't want to spend minutes of my life answering probing questions. Just hang up as they speak.

innocentoldguy3• 4 years ago

I never answer numbers I don’t recognize, but it is still annoying to get these types of calls, again and again, and again.

secondcoming• 4 years ago

Much nicer than Visual Basic.

How dare you.

crypt1d• 4 years ago

I'd love to go back to Delphi and play with it again as I did back in the day, but the price tag kills the mood pretty quickly.

andsoitis3• 4 years ago

You can use it for free with the community edition (https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter) if your revenue is less than $5,000.

anthk2• 4 years ago

Just get Lazarus.

tjr• 4 years ago

I worked for about ten years on a suite of tools written, in large part, in Delphi. As far as I know, those tools are still being maintained in Delphi today.

It was a tiny software group in a large company, and paying Embarcadero whatever they wanted was just a matter of filling out paperwork. I imagine a lot of their current paying customers are in a similar situations.

KingOfCoders• 4 years ago

Only the best memories for Delphi.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 4 years ago

For me when Borland became Embarcadero, it seemed like it lost it’s scrappy hacker ethos.

Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Delphi, C++ Builder were all very innovative products that catered to the individual developer. The Embarcadero rebrand seems like a turn towards Enterprise.

For me now, JetBrains is the new Borland, a scrappy company with a strong focus on what individual developers need and consistently turning out excellent software.

behnamoh• 4 years ago

I still remember Borland’s logo and icons. Something about the 90s and 00s was special and maybe we didn’t appreciate it enough.

browningstreet• 4 years ago

Those Borland books, too. I lived with those Turbo Pascal books.

wenc• 4 years ago

Borland pivoted to enterprise long before this thing called Embarcadero. Recall it renamed itself Inprise before renaming itself back to Borland.

Also Embarcadero isn’t Borland. They acquired Borland’s product lines but not Borland itself.

CRConrad13• 4 years ago

And the original company seems, name change notwithstanding, to have stuck with the "Enterprise"-y mentality of Inprise.

bluedino2• 4 years ago

I'm sure they made a great amount of money doing Turbo C/Pascal via mail order but that market is only so big.

You need the $1,200 compiler suites to make the real cash.

nottorp2• 4 years ago

JetBrains is subscription pricing now.

chinabot5• 4 years ago

Even though I own the latest Delphi Compiler it still seems 2 steps forward and 2 steps back each release, yes it gets better but they always seem to screw some little thing up which you need to work around (high DPI Issues, tcategorypanelgroup and IDE not repainting properly etc since my update from 10.3 to 11.1) 90% of their market is Win32 so I really dont understand why they concentrate 90% their development outside of this.

therealmarv• 4 years ago

I still have the feeling it's the most productive way to create beautiful native Windows desktop programs.

Rapid application development is not an empty promise here.

All my other endeavours with UI programming (Java/Swing, HTML/JS frontends, QT) felt way less productive. Maybe MS C# is the closest to Delphi nowadays.

yakubin• 4 years ago

I wonder if anyone here has experience with both Delphi and SwiftUI. I'd be curious to know which one is more comfortable.

sarsway• 4 years ago

Well there's a reason all the WYSIWYG UI editors died out. They are a quick way to whip up a passable UI, but usually turns out to be quite ugly under the hood, hard to reuse, and a pain to maintain.

Delphi is really from a different age, simpler times, when the common paradigm was having the app directly connected to some sort of SQL database, which serves as a stable, static data source for the UI. Making glorified database editors is what it was really good at.

These days.. things changed. UIs need to be flexible, reactive, reusable, adaptable. UIs that can handle uncertain states, asynchronous data flows, change dynamically and so on. SwiftUI / React / Flutter all ended up at the same paradigm, it's a much more advanced way of doing things. Also, high level languages are much more pleasant to work with.

pjmlp6• 4 years ago

It is, minus AOT experience.

p_l2• 4 years ago

AFAIK one of the main driving forces behind C# and .NET was the designer of Delphi that Microsoft managed to hire away.

CRConrad13• 4 years ago

Yup: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Anders+Hejlsberg

giancarlostoro2• 4 years ago

It does still exist, and I'd love to try it out, but I'm not throwing down thousands of dollars when it costs significantly less for me to get Visual Studio Pro as a single developer ($30 a month iirc) or you know... $120 for JetBrains IDE's annually (after 3 years) it makes no sense for me to throw down a thousand dollars (per year?) same with you Qt. I'm looking to evaluate your product and prototype and maybe build small projects that need a UI but your pricing scheme is not for people like me at all.

One would likely argue that JetBrains probably isnt a RAD IDE, but Visual Studio definitely is fully capable of RAD editing capabilities, think WinForms.

marticode• 4 years ago

They have a free community edition for individuals.

giancarlostoro2• 4 years ago

I tried it out and it wasn't exactly stable. Someone from Embarcadero that was mostly marketing reached out to me and I told them I had issues, they just tried to sell me a license instead of taking the time to get someone technical to talk to me. Not sure I want to buy a license from someone who doesn't invest more into ensuring their primary customer base gets the help they need. I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to build anything commercial under their free tier if I wanted to, so if I want to see if something would be worthwhile now I have to take a thousand dollar gamble as opposed to $30 a month with Visual Studio Pro, or even $120 with JetBrains.

Update: Looks like JetBrains is $149 per year, and moving forward after October 2022 it will be $173 per year.

mhd3• 4 years ago

...for the enterprise. Which is okay, there's plenty of mixed quality software for that sector. It's just that Delphi used to be a lot more oriented towards beginner to small-business developers.

And note that this happened before the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs. If it was all about a reduced audience for desktop-based applications and then supporting that, I would understand it more.

I haven't been following Delphi itself, but the parent company also manages ExtJS, which is aimed/priced similarly, yet with support/quality that doesn't justify this.

Weird that outside of the BCPL or ML families, it's Ada that seems to be the one with the most momentum these days.

alyandon2• 4 years ago

  the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs

Application development has gone backwards so much compared to the RAD tooling from the 90s. I really can't even properly describe it to the younger generation. :(

saiya-jin• 4 years ago

ah the GUI designers from Borland, light years ahead of everything else... it just worked and looked nice (compared to Microsoft shitshow that was Visual Studio back then), was very easy to learn and its the only thing in software I've seen in 20 years which deserved the title RAD.

a-dub• 4 years ago

i think it's probably coming back with this whole low-code/no-code thing.

hankman863• 4 years ago

This. How easy was it to put together a well-functioning Windows desktop app in Delphi, compared with the complexity of developing a Web app these days?

kwanbix3• 4 years ago

I think they really screwed up after Delphi 7, when they did the horrible Delphi.NET.

Also, they should have had some better pricing, something like: Personal use: Free. Commercial use: Free until you are making $x a year, like Unity I think, and then different prices.

Note: I might remember wrong, as this was so long ago. I started with Delphi 1.0!

badsectoracula9• 4 years ago

I think their original pricing scheme for the first 5 or 6 versions of Delphi was fine. The cheapest version was just $100, which even a student could buy by saving for a few weeks (get them hooked while young, etc :-P). The versions that added features focused on enterprises were more expensive but these wouldn't be needed by a lot of people (a lot of Delphi programmers were making small shareware utilities instead of big database applications).

runjake4• 4 years ago

Delphi has a free community edition. The free version only targets Windows, though.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow...

sigzero• 4 years ago

That's kind of "too bad" it's Windows only. I would try it on Linux and/or macos.

minsight2• 4 years ago

Embarcadero was acquired by the same jackasses that bought out a company where I used to work. The new owners had a bunch of attitude and kept crowing on about "their playbook". It turned out that the primary technology that they were buying us for was the one part of our product that we actually licensed from another vendor. I believe they spent millions and didn't get what they were looking for.

They had an offshore team that theoretically could work with the codebase, but I don't remember seeing anything of consequence added to the product in the past 7-8 years. If I ever found that they bought out a company that used technology that I depended upon, I'd migrate to a new solution.

last_responder• 4 years ago

So in your opinion, this should be avoided? Looking to try something new ( old ) and this got me excited but your comment has soured it a bit for me.

badsectoracula9• 4 years ago

Yeah, if you want something like Delphi, try Lazarus instead which -for the most part- is basically an open source and cross platform Delphi clone[0], so you're not bound to the whims of a corporation that is often seen as where old proprietary software goes to die.

[0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

minsight2• 4 years ago

I wouldn't expect much in terms of value or growth from a platform owned by those clowns.

gduke7• 4 years ago

Since Embarcacero was acquired in 2015 and until now, there has happened quite a bit to the RAD Studio IDE and underlying tech. I don't know about your situation, but, Delphi and C++Builder has not been left to rot.

cosmotic2• 4 years ago

I remember one of the great things about delphi was that it statically linked everything into the single .exe making it totally self contained. A Windows GUI program could be a couple hundred KB, no other DLLs required. C/C++ could do the same but you were stuck with nasty raw win32 calls and a lower level language.

badsectoracula9• 4 years ago

FWIW C++ Builder could do the same and had access to VCL too. AFAIK (never tried it) you could mix Delphi and C++ in the same project if you wanted.

rndgermandude2• 4 years ago

yes, you could/can. The VCL itself was written in Delphi and seamlessly linked with C++Builder C++ (they had some language extensions to make it work)

cosmotic2• 4 years ago

Over the years the minimum size of VCL apps increased. Last I checked (10 years ago maybe) it was like 1MB or more compared to 200KB or so in Delphi 3.

pjmlp6• 4 years ago

And to this day, Microsoft botched both experiences that could offer similar productivity with C++ on their stacks, with C++/CLI and C++/CX.

gduke7• 4 years ago

You can still mix C++Builder and Delphi today. Embarcadero made huge efforts to make sure their Clang powered compilers has interop with Delphi code and vice versa. C++Builder still share the VCL and FireMonkey frameworks with Delphi.

jamier19783• 4 years ago

Also the compiler was lightening fast.

DerekL• 4 years ago

* lightning

chinabot5• 4 years ago

Delphi Win32 executables I compiled last century still work fine. I hope the programs I am writing today will still work on whatever version of Windows is around in 25 years. Microsoft for all its many faults has not yet screwed up the Win32 sub-system.

omgmajk• 4 years ago

I have used Lazarus in the last year, it's very ugly but it gets the job done.

pipeline_peak2• 4 years ago

You know a modern company is active when there’s a photo of a black lady with natural hair holding a laptop by a server room.

pipeline_peak2• 4 years ago

Cont'd : Then you walk into the Delphi office and it's just a bunch of Nordic academic guys with grey hair.

CRConrad13• 4 years ago

My hair is still dark; it's just the beard that's mostly grey nowadays.

Signed,

Sid Dabster

shimonabi• 4 years ago

I'm working with the Delphi libraries every day in C++ Builder, bucause my company bet on Turbo C++ and Builder in the 90s, when Microsoft technologies seemed primitive compared to it.

At a recent meetup in my country, 90% of Delphi developers were over 60 years old. Also, Embarcadero licenses aren't cheap.

marcodiego4• 4 years ago

Where do you live?

GnarfGnarf• 4 years ago

We also started with Borland C++ 3.1 in the 90s. The GUI IDE was mind-blowing at the time. It was superior to MS' Workbench. However, Borland really dropped the ball with C++ 4.5, and we had to switch to Visual Studio.

marcodiego4• 4 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.

api2• 4 years ago

They should break off and commercialize just the cross-platform GUI and rapid development IDE for that and put a language like Go under it. Go with a good RAD IDE would be so amazing, like yank out my wallet and throw money at you while shaking amazing.

Give me a good cross platform GUI. Give me a good IDE for it. Don't make me learn yet another fucking programming language that exists nowhere else to use it.

The last part counts against this and also against Flutter, which forces you to learn Dart which is used nowhere but Flutter. What would have been wrong with Go or TypeScript? People already know those.

Most successful languages are open source for very clear reasons, but a cross platform IDE is something that could very well justify being commercial. It's an absolute ton of work and a constant moving target to support. So far no pure open source effort has managed to succeed unless you count the various HTML-based GUI systems that are indirectly subsidized by Google and Apple.

shrubble2• 4 years ago

Have you seen this, and do you have a perspective on it? https://www.remobjects.com/elements/gold/

bluedino2• 4 years ago

Same could be said for Access

aaa_aaa2• 4 years ago

AFAIK they signed a deal with education ministry of Turkey so that Delphi will be taught as the programming language in technical high schools.

pawelmurias• 4 years ago

Super evil

aaa_aaa2• 4 years ago

Not necessarily. I think Delphi with visual programming is ok for students. High school kids like immediate visual feedback and ease of use. Probably deal does not involve money.

CRConrad13• 4 years ago

Super evil

...On the part of the Turkish Ministry of Education, which figured out that they'd get legions of young programmers all primed to jump ship to Free Pascal / Lazarus?

Naah -- smart, but not exactly evil. :-)

marcodiego4• 4 years ago

The linked page may be a snapashot of what delphi became: the video autoplays; controls disappear spontaneously with no obvious way to bring them back; most of the initial time in the video is spent showing the welcome screen: you can now set the background image and theme!; it has lots of text in the form of images, one of these says "Support for 4k+ Screens. Welcome to the future!"; the download button puts you in a page where you have to enter a lot of personal information and prove your are not a robot.

unixhero• 4 years ago

Both Embarcadero.com and Lazarus project homepage refers to that they have the capability of RAD.

Lazarus - "RAD - Rapid Application Development." Embarcadero - "RAD Server - Reduces the complexities of rapidly building and deploying a multi-tier turn-key enterprise REST API application server with Swagger support."

What does RAD refer to? What is it actually?

andsoitis3• 4 years ago

What is RAD? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development

badsectoracula9• 4 years ago

What does RAD refer to?

Rapid Application Development :-P.

Wikipedia has an article[0], but in general it can probably be thought as a precursor to agile (the article says that agile is a RAD method) in that instead of doing some lengthy pre/planing process you use an iterative approach that adapts to what the users want.

In this particular case Lazarus is a RAD IDE in the sense that it allows quick development and iteration of functional GUIs - Delphi was also like that but at some point Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero/Whoever made it more of a name to use for their products ("RAD Studio") than something that describes them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development

cowmix• 4 years ago

I remember going to a convention in 2005 for retail store software and I was amazed that Delphi dominated as the platform for POS systems.

LeonB• 4 years ago

I knew a pharmacist who wrote his own POS software in Delphi. It (and Visual Basic) had that position where they were so usable that even someone whose fulltime job was something else would be able to single handedly make a line of business app for that business.

slt2021• 4 years ago

it is amazing that you could just drop edit boxes and labels, hook up to data source and database and it will work without a single line of code written!

panki27• 4 years ago

One of the best aspects of Delphi is how quickly you can whip together simple GUI applications. The main issue nowadays is finding helpful resources on the internet, as hardly anybody writes Delphi anymore.

For the interested, a free Delphi IDE exists (comes with FreePascal compiler): https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

hengheng• 4 years ago

Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent?

Something that lets me draw a window with two number fields and a button that says "return sum", but it's two minutes of work and self-explanatory.

the_only_law2• 4 years ago

As someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent?

Maybe hard pressed to call it modern, but WinForms is still my go to for quickly making a UI, at least in Windows.

badsectoracula9• 4 years ago

The linked Lazarus. Here is a quick screencast making a window with two fields and a button that sums them (though i forgot the "return sum" caption :-P) in ~45 seconds:

https://i.imgur.com/cATdmhY.mp4

jkaptur2• 4 years ago

I get a little frustrated, because the web is AMAZING for this. Type this in anywhere. Anywhere!

  <input id=foo></input>
  <input id=bar></input>
  <button onclick="sum()">sum</button>
  <div id=result></div>
  <script>
    function sum() {
      result.innerText = parseFloat(foo.value) + parseFloat(bar.value);
    }
  </script>

That's full of "bad practices" but for the use case you're talking about, who cares?

zozbot234• 4 years ago

Something that lets me draw a window with two number fields and a button that says "return sum", but it's two minutes of work and self-explanatory.

Tcl/Tk would be the most straightforward choice. Even easier than Lazarus. It's not really a native look, but practically nothing is truly native these days.

bri3d• 4 years ago

For something trivial and cross platform: Tcl with Tk or Python with wxpython.

Java with Swing does still exist and works too.

It's harder (IMO) to "scale" a Tcl/Tk or wxpython project though as there aren't great built-in patterns and especially with wxpython, the API is a bit clunk and boilerplate heavy.

For a bigger project that you don't need to be cross-platform, you can still make a Windows Forms C# project in Visual Studio. It still works pretty well even, although Visual Studio seems to get slower and farther from this use case each year.

runjake4• 4 years ago

Windows Forms is probably the closest modern RAD equivalent of what you remember:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/

tdeck2• 4 years ago

Folks mentioned a few good options already, but another one is using C# and visual studio's built in form designer. It's very easy to get started with if you've seen a similar language before (e.g. Java).

CRConrad13• 4 years ago

Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent?

As the GP said, FP / Lazarus.

gduke7• 4 years ago

Delphi still exists and is available as a free Community Edition too.

There are plenty of resources and new books being written. You can find a collection at https://learndelphi.org

kwanbix3• 4 years ago

Nowadays they have a free option. Community edition or the like.

kaiken1987• 4 years ago

Delphi and it's components are still nice. But their C++Builder seems like if just keeps getting worse. Instead of maintaining the Borland compiler and debugger they've been replacing it with new ones that work about a quarter as well.

pjmlp6• 4 years ago

Still fairs better than anything Microsoft has done with C++ tooling for GUI development.

gduke7• 4 years ago

The move to Clang was to support C++11 and C++17 language features. The classic Borland compiler was stuck at C++03.

The debugger situation has slowly been improving but there is a unification of using LLDB for all platforms.

bena• 4 years ago

Wow. It looks just like Visual Studio... 6.

I have fond memories of Pascal, it's the language of the first programming class I took.

But yeah. The website and the screenshots do not inspire confidence.

scrapcode• 4 years ago

I have fond memories of using Borland's Delphi when I was a much younger boy. GUI building tools such as Delphi, VS, JavaFX and the old Dreamweaver really helped certain concepts click for me at that age.

lord-squirrel• 4 years ago

Denmark's farming industry's ERP system run on a system called Ø90 which is written delphi, java and cobol. Still being actively maintained by IBM today.

nottorp2• 4 years ago

It may exist but at that price tag only large companies with legacy applications will keep using it.

VikingCoder• 4 years ago

Delphi was great, until C# and WinForms came along. Then there was honestly no reason for me to use Delphi again. All the other UI junk in Visual Studio is terrible in comparison, for me.

pjmlp6• 4 years ago

They still don't offer AOT compilation and low level coding as good as Delphi, even with the upcoming .NET 7 improvements.

Native AOT will only support command line applications, and shared libraries.

Pity that they decided to kill .NET Native.

innocentoldguy3• 4 years ago

I continued using Delphi. I never liked C# or WinForms much. They felt too VB for me.

magicalhippo8• 4 years ago

We use Delphi at work. We've gotten a lot of pressure from customers to move to the web.

However the lack of ways to design non-trivial UIs quickly does not make it seen feasible at the moment.

Then there's the fact that Win32 is like bedrock in terms of stability. We've got forms that's been designed and coded over 15 years ago which still works just as fine as they did back then.

We've got input-heavy UIs, the one I'm working on right now is a single window with >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids. Getting the UI layout done and components connected to the DB will take me a day tops, it'll look great and based on history should work for the next 10+ years. The web seems like such a step back whenever I try it.

yrgulation3• 4 years ago

“ >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids”

Yeah i’ve built single page apps with more input fields than this and grid tables all in a single view. Are you sure this cant be easily done?

Coincidentally that was first 15 years ago with extjs, second time with react 3 years ago - the latter being a slower process but still pretty much doable.

magicalhippo8• 4 years ago

Are you sure this cant be easily done?

No, I'm no web expert. We've not found a way so far, and I've not seen something like this on the web, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

edit: to clarify, I don't doubt one can get 150 fields in a view on the web. But can one dev do it in one day and have it look great?

liveoneggs• 4 years ago

Does #1 still work?

dimgl• 4 years ago

However the lack of ways to design non-trivial UIs quickly does not make it seen feasible at the moment.

I'm... not sure this is true. There are plenty of ways of designing non-trivial UIs on the web.

dimitrios1• 4 years ago

There are indeed plenty of ways of designing non-trivial UIs on the web, but I am not sure any of them are that great, especially when you involve state. And there has been a mountain of pre-work done to make web UIs appear uniform across devices and browsers, and even with that pre-work done you still have issues on various mobile and tablet devices.

I'm kind of curious now.

Delphi claims you can "Build Native Apps 5x Faster With One Codebase For Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux" the biggest corollary I can think of there is Election, and we all know how we feel about Electron apps here.

Joeri• 4 years ago

We've got input-heavy UIs, the one I'm working on right now is a single window with >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids.

I went through this transition in the late 2000’s, moving grid and form heavy delphi windows screens to webpages, using ExtJS, the only framework at the time which kind of sort of could do this.

The process made me realise two things:

1. if you try to map information-dense UI’s like that to the web, it will cost more to develop and the UX will be worse. (we saw double the dev cost and a slower and more cumbersome ui)

2. in most cases information-dense UI like that is bad design and should be avoided. I couldn’t see it back then how things could be done differently to make screens less dense, but looking back there were plenty of ways.

magicalhippo8• 4 years ago

in most cases information-dense UI like that is bad design and should be avoided.

We do auto-expand a lot of groups, ie for company name and address fields we might just show name and org. number until you enter the company name field, at which point we show with the full name and address set. Once you leave the group it collapses again.

Still, the information-dense UI is what our users like, as far as I can determine. They want to take one look at an order or invoice and get the info they need, not having to flip through several tabs or pages.

Part of this is also driven by gov't requirements. That is, users are officially responsible for the data they submit, so they must be able to see all the data they submit.

shrubble2• 4 years ago

What no one in the responses is talking about ...is speed of using the UI during day to day operations.

Web interfaces are extremely clunky to use when trying to do things via only-keyboard (which is the only way to have muscle-memory help you zip through forms) methods.

They are slow to update and in some cases, the Web browser's UI is fighting with you, such as offering to replace your input with the previous data you put in a form field of the same name, etc. In certain cases the tab method of navigation between fields gets broken or something else that interrupts the person's flow happens.

Having worked in a case where the ticketing system and related interfaces were half-Web and half-Java-application-on-Windows - even the Java application was better to use via the keyboard.

If you are paying people on a regular basis, whether hourly or per-shift, and the UI slows people down by 5% , what is the cost over the (perhaps) 3 years of that application's life?

Even 4 users at $50k/year each in the USA (with healthcare and other business expenses etc. that means a $20/hour full time job) means $10K/year (5% * 200K salaries) in extra expense.

chinabot5• 4 years ago

On my new ThinkPad and the latest Delphi it compiles/links at 50-60K lines/second that performance has been consistent throughout the 25 years using Delphi. What it means in practice is you change a line of code, press F9 and the program is executing with no discernable delay.

rightbyte• 4 years ago

5% is way to low number.

You surely have noticed how employees speed hack away on the keyboard with those old terminal style TUI apps.

Modern UX is almost all about looking sleek to the procurer, not usable for the end luser.

Desti314• 4 years ago

No clue how much experience you have with normal webuis but they do not match mine at all.

You can use tab and hotkeys, add hints for auto fill (or just straight disabling them for a page).

Normal UIs are fast enough.

I'm not necessarily advocating for only web but I don't think your arguments holding up with reality

rossmohax• 4 years ago

Did you need to do anything to support HiDPI displays in those 10+ years old forms?

magicalhippo8• 4 years ago

It's mostly taken care of by the framework, though we have some breathing space due to our customers not jumping on HiDPI. It took some years for most of the kinks to be ironed out in the framework from what I gathered.

We've yet to receive a HiDPI bug report, but we do get reports when we forget some customers still run 800x600 screens...

runjake4• 4 years ago

Similarly, Windows Forms[1] still exists and is still being developed. Yeah, it was "deprecated" by Microsoft[2], but it's since been "un-deprecated".

Windows Forms is C# and borrows heavily from Delphi's Rapid Application Development (RAD) style.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Forms

2. http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/WPF-QA

kaba02• 4 years ago

Could someone please explain/describe how GUI creation was done with Delphi? I tried to look up a video/wiki page but I don’t see what kind of abstraction did it use and why was it as liked?

spapas82• 4 years ago

You can try the lazarus ide https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ since it is more or less an open source version of delphi.

Tldr; it's a similar experience to vb6: drag n drop controls into a form, edit their properties and write code for their events...

unnouinceput4• 4 years ago

You mean how you open Delphi IDE, create a new project (default is Windows VCL, but you can also do cross-platform FireMonkey just as easy), then when the main form is presented in IDE how you drop components from the components palette? As in same way you do it in Visual Studio when doing a WPF and or/ Winforms project as well? Or as in any visual IDE for any programming language, because they all follow the same idea?

kaba02• 4 years ago

I guess? I was interested in whether it had some unique feature/paradigm, or was it loved for some other reason.

LorenPechtel2• 4 years ago

Drag and drop. Look at Visual Studio's handling of C#--and polish it. And note that I'm comparing a 15 year old version of Delphi against current VS--and I still favor the Delphi version.

29athrowaway• 4 years ago

If you want Delphi to succeed you have to win the developers.

The Embarcadero website experience for a developer is nonsense. The first thing you see in the page is "BUY NOW", "FREE TRIAL". It's so aggressive that my instant reaction is to close the product page before I even get to see what the product is about.

And no, I don't want a "product demo". I don't want to contact sales. I am a developer I don't care about that. "Contact sales"/"Request a product demo" sounds intimidating. It sounds like you want me to spend $5000, which I am not willing to spend.

My primary objective as a developer is to develop applications. The website has to focus on assisting that process.

archielc• 4 years ago

I used Borland Delphi (as well as C++ Builder for some period) throughout my university times for all kinds of home works and hobby apps. It was extremely easy to build simple but still good-looking UIs. At some point I even had a small reusable library for graph problems (add/edit nodes/edges with nice arrows/labels etc.) What I really liked was how fast you could get to real coding part with minimum boilerplate. Happy to see Lazarus IDE still having a strong community.

Double_a_92• 4 years ago

If only debugging worked properly, especially in 64bit applications...

badrabbit• 4 years ago

For the unaware delphi packers are somewhat popular with malware authors.

jamier19783• 4 years ago

A significant amount of Delphi code I wrote 20+ years ago is still in the wild and still making a ton of money for a company I used to work for.

I actually miss the days of Windows desktop development. Good Times.

chinabot5• 4 years ago

All my future developments will be in Lazarus but I have one mega-client with a big Delphi production program I have to keep happy for the foreseeable future or until their large team of developers and advisors can decide which language/platform/infrastructure etc they want to redevelop it in.

3+ years of consultants and meetings but not one line of code so far :-)

CRConrad13• 4 years ago

Put in a bid to port it to FP/Lazarus?

(Oh, you already did that? ;-)

elzbardico• 4 years ago

Borland was just another example of Death-By-MBA.

Kaibeezy• 4 years ago

Editorialized title. It really does detract from the discussion. Let us reach our own judgments. Or am I missing something?

hankman863• 4 years ago

I still have a warm spot in my heart for Delphi. When I bought a license for Delphi 1.0 running on Windows 3.1, it was like a revelation to me. Having previously used Borland Pascal on DOS, I found it unbelievable how easy developing Windows UIs can be. I developed a 16-bit business app (accounting, inventory management, customer records) on Delphi 1.0 which is still running today (you need a 32 bit version of Windows 7 though). The bundled Borland Database Engine (Paradox desktop) was decent enough for structured data management in a single-user application. The best feature was the compiler that sprinted through my source code, turning it into a statically linked executable in mere seconds (on a Pentium 60).

While I have long moved on from Pascal, many great ideas of Delphi live on in C# and Typescript.

RachelF• 4 years ago

Except the small statically linked executable.

C# needs .NET which has its very own circle of dll hell with compatibility and confusion version numbers for your users.

kokizzu2• 4 years ago

US$ 1,599 XD not using windows, delphi, c++ anymore so, no..

unpeasant• 4 years ago

Went for a job interview last year and the tech stack was an API built in Delphi, on Macs, using a virtual machine running Windows.

Company was doing well from it, but trying to scale, and finding anyone to code delphi was impossible.

jamier19783• 4 years ago

As someone who worked with Delphi for many years I've often wondered if there is a lot of money to be made by charging companies to work on these codebases. As much as I liked Delphi back in the day, low job satisfaction puts me off looking in to the idea.

CRConrad13• 4 years ago

Throw me a link or a mail, gotta see if they're still looking.

LorenPechtel2• 4 years ago

So what if it does?

In the old days I loved them. Then I found myself using older versions despite having newer ones because of important bugs.

Then came 64 bit code. They were years late in releasing a compiler that could produce 64 bit code and the reaction from the company seemed to be that it's a tiny portion of the users that need it.

Never mind that for that not-so-tiny portion (you might have no direct need of 64 bit address space but if you have to play nice with 64 bit code you have to be 64 bit--plugins) it was a total showstopper, companies relying on it were dead in the water, had to to a total rewrite or die.

I got the strong feeling that they were looking at us customers as a resource to be milked, not supported. My employer at the time died in the housing collapse, while I still have a couple of little Delphi apps around that I wrote I haven't touched it since then. C# was almost as good (and at this point all that's missing are arrays with an enum index and arrays that don't start at zero) and has much better support.

Delphi still exists and is actively developed

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