Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/embarcadero-bridges-gap-from-desktop-mobile-with-new-ios-support-cbuilder-xe5-1861218.htm

by srisa • 13 years ago

16 38 13 years ago

marketwired.com

japaget• 13 years ago

Embarcadero C++Builder is the successor to Borland's Turbo C. It has changed names several times, having been marketed under the brands Borland, Inprise, CodeGear, and Embarcadero.

pjmlp14• 13 years ago

Actually Borland C++.

The guys responsible for those changes of brand killed Borland products. :(

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

Actually Borland C++.

Actually, Borland C++Builder.

malkia2• 13 years ago

Makes me wonder if they should not bring the old Borland name (or even Turbo). That'll resonate at least with a lot more older developers (that might be managers now).

I stared with programming with TURBO.COM (Turbo Pascal 3.0) - it was 33kb DOS executable and had built-in editor - fit on a diskette, and there was space for other things.

I skipped version 4 (Turbo/Borland Pascal) and had most fun with 5.0 and 5.5, then 6.0 was solid, and later it was the last time I've used Borland products - the first Delphi and that was it.

Turbo Vision (Borland's GUI for Text Mode - e.g. DOS) was very advanced. I've briefly tried OWL (C/C++ I think) - but had to move onto other things.

Then Delphi was very easy to build interfaces, and later when Microsoft snatched Anders Hejlsberg it kind of resurfaced in Microsoft's products. For example MFC's GUI editing was much worse (and still is) than whatever Delphi had 15 or more years ago (my opinion, I know too many MFC fans out there, and surely they still love it).

pjmlp14• 13 years ago

Delphi could have been the modern C# if Borland had better management, I would say.

barrkel• 13 years ago

The Borland name was bought by Microfocus after Borland sold the developer tools division to Embarcadero.

tux105• 13 years ago

The biggest issue C++Builder has for me is that it is pretty damn expensive considering Xcode is included as part of OS X. The Professional version is £850 and still requires the extra purchase of the Mobile Add-on pack which is an extra £423! That makes the total cost £1273!! I would rather pay less and buy a Macbook Air which comes with Xcode.

pjmlp14• 13 years ago

If it is just you, it might be expensive, but it is pretty cheap for big companies, when you compare it with other commercial frameworks or compilers.

tux105• 13 years ago

Yeah I am talking about individuals. I guess I am not their target customer though. Obviously to big companies a few thousand is nothing (especially when you look at >$10k for MSDN Ultimate) but Embarcadero have zero products aimed towards the individual developer (not even the Starter Edition is worth it as it is so limited for the price).

networked2• 13 years ago

According Embarcadero's website Delphi XE5 offers all the same plus Android support: http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi, http://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder. If they're targeting mobile developers I wonder why Embarcadero hasn't released a cheap "indie" version of Delphi yet. Last I checked it had much better compile times than C++Builder and the language itself could easily be marketed as a "friendlier C++". Meanwhile, outside of some larger companies where it's entrenched Delphi's popularity is waning.

Edit: Now that I've looked at their online store through a US proxy I see that they have: https://store.embarcadero.com/542/catalog/product.s3703/lang.... Not that the conditions are very good:

If you’re an individual you may use the Starter Edition to create apps for your own use and apps that you can sell until your revenues reach $1,000 per year. If you’re a small company or organization without revenue (or up to $1,000 per year in revenue), you can also use the Starter Edition. Once your company's total revenue reaches US $1,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, move up to the Professional edition with an unrestricted commercial license.

The upgrade from Starter to Professional costs $899.00.

pjmlp14• 13 years ago

I used to love Borland tools.

Having learned Turbo Pascal before C, I never liked C, given the capabilities of Turbo Pascal.

Type safety, blazing compile times, modules, system level programming, objects.

Management killed Borland products thanks to their continuous change of brand, lack of investment on Kylix and Anders going to Microsoft.

Most customers became reluctant to keep investing on their tooling.

malkia2• 13 years ago

I loved it too. I moved to "C" because of one missing function in Pascal (and as I would say now - it's runtime library) - "movefile" - e.g. moving file from one directory to another.

Also someone was spreading rumours that all games were written in C/C++ so we had to move to it :)

When I learned assembly, and got my Ralph Brown's interrupt list (best thing ever back in the days) I went back to Pascal and made little assembly function for "movefile".

I remmember friend of mine, who just moved to "C" put all his code in the .h file - and it was compiling all the time. Back then having .TPU file and not having to write additional header file was very advanced compared to C/C++ - and the compilation times were much faster.

zura• 13 years ago

My experience was quite the opposite - Borland C++ 3.1 and I never liked Pascal ;)

networked2• 13 years ago

What you're saying rings true to me. I also learned Borland/Turbo/Object Pascal first (perhaps somewhat unusually, I went from Borland Pascal to C++ to Delphi when learning to program as a kid). Although I can't say I never liked C there are many things about Object Pascal I found superior that I miss in C, especially the built-in string type (for those who haven't used it, in C-land it can be compared to bstrings but it's handled completely transparently).

If you wanted to use Object Pascal today and not have to rely on Embarcadero for the continued support of your tools you could use Free Pascal and Lazarus, which are both free software (GPL-licensed). Unfortunately, there's bit of a stigma against using any variant of Pascal these days (to which, no doubt, the many crappy CRUD apps written in Delphi and Borland's management of their product have both contributed), so it's not a good choice for new projects, especially free and open source. I wonder if Nimrod could be the comeback of type-safe compiled languages that don't target the JVM.

lobster_johnson5• 13 years ago

They really, really wanted to become an "enterprise" company. They acquired certain management people who saw development tools as a dead end, and decided all the money was in the enterprise.

But they misjudged the market, and invested in products like Visibroker and Midas (and dead-end tech like CORBA), not really understanding what they ought to be building.

(This wasn't the beginning of their troubles, though. They bungled a lot of decisions before then, especially with the purchase of dBase and Paradox, and the Windows version of Quattro Pro.)

I stopped using Delphi in the late 1990s, but even then I could see how it was heading towards obsolescence. Not the GUI development model itself, which was brilliant and which I sorely miss for OS X GUI development today, but Object Pascal.

Sure, Object Pascal is a good language, but it was very insular, not portable, often very Windows-specific, didn't integrate well with other things, and didn't evolve fast enough. I was able to work with C and C++ libraries, including Dialogic hardware APIs and Microsoft tech such as MAPI and TAPI, by writing a translator (htrans) that parsed header files into an AST and produced Object Pascal interface files for them. But it was very tiring. I had high hopes for C++Builder, but it was a major disappointment when it arrived. For one, it relied on a lot of proprietary C++ extensions.

I was using Delphi/Object Pascal for a lot a systems development, non-GUI backend stuff. It seems a bit quixotic today, but it was fun, and I liked the language. It sort of filled a particular niche that Java would overtake a few years later.

cmollis• 13 years ago

here's what most cross-platform library vendors never get: it's actually easier, and ultimately faster, to learn each environment's native API, then learn one cross-platform API and all of the idiosyncrasies on each platform it supports. Inevitably, there will be some aspect of the native platform that doesn't work correctly within the x-platform sdk and then you have to hack around it.

pjmlp14• 13 years ago

The first time I got to learn that was when I had to maintain a server application across the commercial UNIXes of the 90's.

POSIX was not as portable as they advertised.

72deluxe2• 13 years ago

I used to use Borland's products in a job. They used C++ Builder 6 and migrated their code to the later compiler, Codegear 2007 and it was truly dire (6 was alright). It was exceptionally buggy, the linker continually crashed, and the help system took 14 hours to install (not an exaggeration). The VCL had difficulty with manifests and proper theming on XP and above I think (particularly tab pages) and it desperately needed fixing / replacing. The company tested the version after 2007 and it would compile illegal C++.

I think after they spent years developing C++ Architect and then chucking it in the bin, many of the developers jumped ship and Borland was left with few developers, a shell of its former self. They also had stupid products like their PHP IDE (I wonder how many they actually sold???) and as far as I know the company I used to work for is still making software using the creaking aging VCL! A large code base to rewrite is no fun!

A shame for Borland (or whatever they are called these days) but I am not inclined to buy this software.

Embarcadero Bridges Gap From Desktop to Mobile - supports iOS in C++Builder XE5

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