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There are many big and well-known software packages written in Delphi. Yet Delphi the language is not well known. I recently read an article on Flutter compar

There are many big and well-known software packages written in Delphi. Yet Delphi the language is not well known. I recently read an article on Flutter comparing to native Android layouts, and thought to myself: Delphi has had a x-plat framework that does all that, and more, in less lines of code, for six years. (*) Disclaimer: I work for the company that makes Delphi. I do that because I think it and its sister C++Builder are great products and want to see it better-known.

purerandomness 8y ago
In an alternative reality, Delphi would have won and we would have native Delphi apps instead of Electron. But we can't have nice things.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Specially when many devs refuse to pay for their tools, while asking to get paid for their work.
  - donatj 8y ago
    Good enough is the enemy of good. Good enough and free trumps good and for pay every time.
bitL 8y ago
Lower the prices... Or make it more accessible like how JetBrains did before they switched to a subscription model? That would give you instant developer love.
Filligree 8y ago
I'd love to try it... But my budget for hobby projects is $0, and a time-limited trial isn't useful. Therefore I won't try it, and I won't be advocating it to anyone else either.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter
  - donatj 8y ago
    Even so, it’s pretty mediocre that it only builds Windows apps, and putting MacOS and Linux support on different tiers $1500 dollars apart is pretty cruel.
  - realusername 8y ago
    I only use Linux on my case and the starter seems to be Windows-only.
  - Filligree 8y ago
    I don't own a Windows license, so this is a non-starter.
- tremendo 8y ago
  https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
pjmlp 8y ago
C++ Builder is great. Only with UWP and C++/CX did Visual C++ finally gotten visual, and it still doesn't do as well as Builder.
StavrosK 8y ago
There's a big obstacle to Delphi adoption that people below have mentioned: Cost. Even the starter pack has a limit of $1000 in revenue, and Delphi costs $3000 or so. I'm never going to use Delphi if it means that five years later, my app that costs $3 and makes a sale a week will need me to spend $3000 licensing it or open me up to lawsuits. I like Autodesk's license for Fusion, it's free to use (the full version) until you're making $100,000 in yearly revenues, after which it costs some amount of money. If I were making $100k in revenues (and probably well before that), I would happily pay for the tool that's making me money, but paying 3x my revenue for the IDE/language is hilariously prohibitive. There's also no way in hell I'm going to spend $3000 for a hobby project that may or may not make $100 during its lifetime. It's too bad, too, because I remember how easy and quick developing in VB4/VB5 was, so Delphi sounds great on paper, and I would definitely use it to develop at least some applications if it weren't so expensive.
- ksec 8y ago
  >It's too bad, too, because I remember how easy and quick developing in VB4/VB5 was, so Delphi sounds great on paper, and I would definitely use it to develop at least some applications if it weren't so expensive. I have been having these thoughts for the past few weeks. After the watching DHH's RailsConf Keynote and thinking about Conceptual Compression, and current technology. Why have we made everything 10x more complicated over years. It is not just Web Sites, Apps as well. VB may be ugly, but it lower the entry barrier. ( VB.Net is an entirely different thing ). Delphi literally have everything done right for well over a decade and it's idea and philosophy aren't being copied anywhere. Instead of making software easier for everybody to learn, easier to maintain and less prone to bug, making debugging easier, higher performant and less recourse hungry. We have managed to bloat the framework, the languages, the CPU and memory resources, trillion times more abstracted. Everything is a hack over another hack.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    Exactly. The problem with Delphi is that it tries to be too many things, for example we don't need another language ecosystem, but we do need great cross-platform UI toolkits/development workflows. Delphi excels at that, but if the library I want to use isn't available for the language, I'm out of luck. If we could keep the great dev tooling and UI toolkit, but use a language with a larger ecosystem, that would be much more impactful. Maybe Python + Qt can be the answer to that.
Aloha 8y ago
I work for a company that ships a delphi based product, you've not lived till you've hand edited a .dfm ;-)

purerandomness 8y ago

In an alternative reality, Delphi would have won and we would have native Delphi apps instead of Electron. But we can't have nice things.

pjmlp 8y ago
Specially when many devs refuse to pay for their tools, while asking to get paid for their work.
- donatj 8y ago
  Good enough is the enemy of good. Good enough and free trumps good and for pay every time.

bitL 8y ago

Lower the prices... Or make it more accessible like how JetBrains did before they switched to a subscription model? That would give you instant developer love.

Filligree 8y ago

I'd love to try it... But my budget for hobby projects is $0, and a time-limited trial isn't useful. Therefore I won't try it, and I won't be advocating it to anyone else either.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter
- donatj 8y ago
  Even so, it’s pretty mediocre that it only builds Windows apps, and putting MacOS and Linux support on different tiers $1500 dollars apart is pretty cruel.
- realusername 8y ago
  I only use Linux on my case and the starter seems to be Windows-only.
- Filligree 8y ago
  I don't own a Windows license, so this is a non-starter.
tremendo 8y ago
https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

pjmlp 8y ago

C++ Builder is great. Only with UWP and C++/CX did Visual C++ finally gotten visual, and it still doesn't do as well as Builder.

StavrosK 8y ago

There's a big obstacle to Delphi adoption that people below have mentioned: Cost. Even the starter pack has a limit of $1000 in revenue, and Delphi costs $3000 or so. I'm never going to use Delphi if it means that five years later, my app that costs $3 and makes a sale a week will need me to spend $3000 licensing it or open me up to lawsuits. I like Autodesk's license for Fusion, it's free to use (the full version) until you're making $100,000 in yearly revenues, after which it costs some amount of money. If I were making $100k in revenues (and probably well before that), I would happily pay for the tool that's making me money, but paying 3x my revenue for the IDE/language is hilariously prohibitive. There's also no way in hell I'm going to spend $3000 for a hobby project that may or may not make $100 during its lifetime. It's too bad, too, because I remember how easy and quick developing in VB4/VB5 was, so Delphi sounds great on paper, and I would definitely use it to develop at least some applications if it weren't so expensive.

ksec 8y ago
>It's too bad, too, because I remember how easy and quick developing in VB4/VB5 was, so Delphi sounds great on paper, and I would definitely use it to develop at least some applications if it weren't so expensive. I have been having these thoughts for the past few weeks. After the watching DHH's RailsConf Keynote and thinking about Conceptual Compression, and current technology. Why have we made everything 10x more complicated over years. It is not just Web Sites, Apps as well. VB may be ugly, but it lower the entry barrier. ( VB.Net is an entirely different thing ). Delphi literally have everything done right for well over a decade and it's idea and philosophy aren't being copied anywhere. Instead of making software easier for everybody to learn, easier to maintain and less prone to bug, making debugging easier, higher performant and less recourse hungry. We have managed to bloat the framework, the languages, the CPU and memory resources, trillion times more abstracted. Everything is a hack over another hack.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  Exactly. The problem with Delphi is that it tries to be too many things, for example we don't need another language ecosystem, but we do need great cross-platform UI toolkits/development workflows. Delphi excels at that, but if the library I want to use isn't available for the language, I'm out of luck. If we could keep the great dev tooling and UI toolkit, but use a language with a larger ecosystem, that would be much more impactful. Maybe Python + Qt can be the answer to that.

Aloha 8y ago

I work for a company that ships a delphi based product, you've not lived till you've hand edited a .dfm ;-)