10 ms·

Delphi 11 Alexandria

150 points by mariuz 5y ago

mobilio 5y ago
Mine last Delphi was 7... greatest release!
- petepete 5y 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 5y 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.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    For inexplicable reasons well beyond my understanding mainstream development had always gone into the most masochistic state.
  - mhd 5y ago
    Now talk to some Smalltalk developers...
  - askvictor 5y 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 5y 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.
  - wruza 5y 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.
- wruza 5y ago
  I pretend to think that it was actually the final, complete release.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    I mean, the number 7 means perfection to some people, right?
- nobleach 5y 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!
nly 5y 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.
- squarefoot 5y 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/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
  - nottorp 5y 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.
  - Kliment 5y 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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mrtksn 5y 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.
- Kliment 5y 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
  - mobilio 5y 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.
    - FpUser 5y ago
      They had flops, meh versions / releases and good ones stability wise. Just as any other major IDE (or product for that matter). I own Delphi and still nothing beats it productivity wise for desktop applications. I successfully used Lazarus as well to develop Raspberry Pi based GUI software that controls various electronic gizmos(debugging on Pi was unstable but I've managed). For products that do not have GUI (or using browser for front end) I stick to C++. Embarcadero's pricing / marketing though does suck big time. Well, the only product that comes close to Delphi for GUI development is QT and their licensing and pricing sucks even more.
KindOne 5y ago
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28489516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28489516 - "RAD Studio 11 Alexandria" - 11 days ago
rob74 5y 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.
- mhd 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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
    - mhd 5y ago
      Honestly, I'm not so sure about your conclusion. Businesses themselves don't want job runners. They want their job to be easier. I mean, that's what I liked about Delphi: It was inflexible, it was (relatively) low on code. Not as much as Visual Basic, which for me always seems to have crossed one bridge too far. But it wasn't exactly highfalutin software engineering all the time. Especially when you're just "beating Excel" by having a simple database interface. Mainframe apps are something entirely different, but at least the interface is even closer to the data. Some form based apps seem rather like "naked objects". I think those two "extremes" worked well. Very restricted UI, but that means it's easy to get familiar with it, and enough shortcuts to involve into a very honed workflow for experts. Or a native app, where you're just used to how things work, from toolbars to scrollbars to combo boxes. Early web apps were worse, as the HTTP cycle messed up easy tasks, both from a programming and UI perspective. And you still didn't have system-wide shortcuts and all the other UI niceties that were happening since Apple introduced the Mac in 84. But modern ones? Yeah, sure, now you've got easier dialogs, but still no proper shortcuts and expected UI behavior -- and the web and mobile apps are now going on for long enough that nobody knows anything about that anymore, so there's no word for this loss. I can forgive people not knowing about files and folders anymore, but people should know how a button looks and works.
dadior 5y ago
I was using Delphi 5 for years, that's 2001 year, to build a Vehicle annual inspection system
FrankSansC 5y 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.
tragomaskhalos 5y 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.
- pantulis 5y ago
  Ahhhh the Rogue Wave standard libraries! CORBA! The ACE Reactor Library! We had all that in 1998, kiddos.
  - huhtenberg 5y ago
    > CORBA Brrrr... /shudders
    - tragomaskhalos 5y ago
      First law of distributed objects: Don't distribute your objects !
    - pantulis 5y ago
      I shudder these days whenever a read about thrift, grpc and other binary protocols.
  - gonzus 5y ago
aortega 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
nikkinana 5y ago
If it works as well as their website looks I'm all in!
marcodiego 5y ago
I have to repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28491963 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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
xony 5y ago
borland died .. wasted my 4 years on this product.
- criddell 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

150 points by mariuz 5y ago

mobilio 5y ago

Mine last Delphi was 7... greatest release!

petepete 5y 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 5y 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.
- FpUser 5y ago
  For inexplicable reasons well beyond my understanding mainstream development had always gone into the most masochistic state.
- mhd 5y ago
  Now talk to some Smalltalk developers...
- askvictor 5y 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 5y 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.
- wruza 5y 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.
wruza 5y ago
I pretend to think that it was actually the final, complete release.
- jhgb 5y ago
  I mean, the number 7 means perfection to some people, right?
nobleach 5y 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!

nly 5y 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.

squarefoot 5y 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/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
- nottorp 5y 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.
- Kliment 5y 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mrtksn 5y 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.

Kliment 5y 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
- mobilio 5y 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.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    They had flops, meh versions / releases and good ones stability wise. Just as any other major IDE (or product for that matter). I own Delphi and still nothing beats it productivity wise for desktop applications. I successfully used Lazarus as well to develop Raspberry Pi based GUI software that controls various electronic gizmos(debugging on Pi was unstable but I've managed). For products that do not have GUI (or using browser for front end) I stick to C++. Embarcadero's pricing / marketing though does suck big time. Well, the only product that comes close to Delphi for GUI development is QT and their licensing and pricing sucks even more.

KindOne 5y ago

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

rob74 5y 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.

mhd 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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
  - mhd 5y ago
    Honestly, I'm not so sure about your conclusion. Businesses themselves don't want job runners. They want their job to be easier. I mean, that's what I liked about Delphi: It was inflexible, it was (relatively) low on code. Not as much as Visual Basic, which for me always seems to have crossed one bridge too far. But it wasn't exactly highfalutin software engineering all the time. Especially when you're just "beating Excel" by having a simple database interface. Mainframe apps are something entirely different, but at least the interface is even closer to the data. Some form based apps seem rather like "naked objects". I think those two "extremes" worked well. Very restricted UI, but that means it's easy to get familiar with it, and enough shortcuts to involve into a very honed workflow for experts. Or a native app, where you're just used to how things work, from toolbars to scrollbars to combo boxes. Early web apps were worse, as the HTTP cycle messed up easy tasks, both from a programming and UI perspective. And you still didn't have system-wide shortcuts and all the other UI niceties that were happening since Apple introduced the Mac in 84. But modern ones? Yeah, sure, now you've got easier dialogs, but still no proper shortcuts and expected UI behavior -- and the web and mobile apps are now going on for long enough that nobody knows anything about that anymore, so there's no word for this loss. I can forgive people not knowing about files and folders anymore, but people should know how a button looks and works.

dadior 5y ago

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

FrankSansC 5y 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.

tragomaskhalos 5y 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.

pantulis 5y ago
Ahhhh the Rogue Wave standard libraries! CORBA! The ACE Reactor Library! We had all that in 1998, kiddos.
- huhtenberg 5y ago
  > CORBA Brrrr... /shudders
  - tragomaskhalos 5y ago
    First law of distributed objects: Don't distribute your objects !
  - pantulis 5y ago
    I shudder these days whenever a read about thrift, grpc and other binary protocols.
- gonzus 5y ago

aortega 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

nikkinana 5y ago

If it works as well as their website looks I'm all in!

marcodiego 5y ago

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

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xony 5y ago

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

criddell 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.