9 ms·

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 begin

by 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.
  - nly 5y ago
    I can't add much to this really. The Qt Company obviously don't think app developers using slightly old versions of their software provide any value to their shareholders, even though you're helping to grow the broader Qt ecosystem (libraries available, product awareness, knowledge sharing, growing the job market, etc). As far as the Qt company are concerned if you're a FOSS app developer, and not on bleeding edge Qt 6 and actively contributing bug reports (i.e. acting as their outsourced QA), then you're just a worthless leech. The feeling is the Qt library is only FOSS at this point because their hands are tied contractually by the KDE foundation. This has lead the KDE foundation to create a surprisingly active fork of Qt 5.15: https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qtbase/-/commits/kde/5.15 https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qtbase/-/commits/kde/5.15 which is now the default Qt 5 base package on Arch Linux: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages/qt5-base/trunk/PKGBUILD#L31 https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages...
    - asddubs 5y ago
      Isn't it the case that the KDE foundation can basically just yank away Qt for any reason they see fit? Seems like the Qt company would be playing a dangerous game there
      - Kliment 5y ago
        No. Only if the Qt Company violates the terms of the agreement.
        asddubs 5y ago
        Right, seems like I misremembered this part: >The foundation will control the rights to the Qt Free Edition and ensure that current and future releases of Qt will be available for free software development at all times. All changes to the Qt Free Edition license will have to be approved by the KDE Free Qt Foundation which will consist of two members of Troll Tech AS as well as two members of the KDE project. One of the representatives of the KDE project will have a double vote to be used in case of a tie. so they have full control (majority of the votes) over approving license changes but I guess that doesn't mean they can enact them on their own https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqt_announcement/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqt_announcement/
- vetinari 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? The minor releases are free only until next major one is out. After that, further minor releases are proprietary-only. I.e. that means right now, no free updates to 5.x anymore, if you want maintained release, only 6.0 is an option.
rob74 5y ago
There is Lazarus, which is an open source Delphi clone based on Free Pascal. Haven't tried it yet though. But the file manager I use daily (https://github.com/doublecmd/doublecmd https://github.com/doublecmd/doublecmd) is written in it, and I have some ideas for improving it, so maybe I will try to compile that project for good old time's sake...
- meibo 5y ago
  For anyone that's curious, popular game hacking/reverse engineering tool Cheat Engine(basically a fully fledged Windows debugger nowadays) is also made in Lazarus - though I can't seem to come up with anything else that is from the top of my head.
chadcmulligan 5y ago
> just before Borland went all-in on .NET and ruined the IDE. That was when it went off the rails and never recovered imho, others are mentioning Borlands business practices which were not the best at the time. Technically it lost direction as well, it never developed a response to Java, .Net and the web, and still doesn't, though you can actually develop web applications with Delphi to, with 3rd party components and they work very well.

by nly 5y ago

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.
- nly 5y ago
  I can't add much to this really. The Qt Company obviously don't think app developers using slightly old versions of their software provide any value to their shareholders, even though you're helping to grow the broader Qt ecosystem (libraries available, product awareness, knowledge sharing, growing the job market, etc). As far as the Qt company are concerned if you're a FOSS app developer, and not on bleeding edge Qt 6 and actively contributing bug reports (i.e. acting as their outsourced QA), then you're just a worthless leech. The feeling is the Qt library is only FOSS at this point because their hands are tied contractually by the KDE foundation. This has lead the KDE foundation to create a surprisingly active fork of Qt 5.15: https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qtbase/-/commits/kde/5.15 https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qtbase/-/commits/kde/5.15 which is now the default Qt 5 base package on Arch Linux: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages/qt5-base/trunk/PKGBUILD#L31 https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages...
  - asddubs 5y ago
    Isn't it the case that the KDE foundation can basically just yank away Qt for any reason they see fit? Seems like the Qt company would be playing a dangerous game there
    - Kliment 5y ago
      No. Only if the Qt Company violates the terms of the agreement.
      - asddubs 5y ago
        Right, seems like I misremembered this part: >The foundation will control the rights to the Qt Free Edition and ensure that current and future releases of Qt will be available for free software development at all times. All changes to the Qt Free Edition license will have to be approved by the KDE Free Qt Foundation which will consist of two members of Troll Tech AS as well as two members of the KDE project. One of the representatives of the KDE project will have a double vote to be used in case of a tie. so they have full control (majority of the votes) over approving license changes but I guess that doesn't mean they can enact them on their own https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqt_announcement/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqt_announcement/
vetinari 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? The minor releases are free only until next major one is out. After that, further minor releases are proprietary-only. I.e. that means right now, no free updates to 5.x anymore, if you want maintained release, only 6.0 is an option.

rob74 5y ago

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

meibo 5y ago
For anyone that's curious, popular game hacking/reverse engineering tool Cheat Engine(basically a fully fledged Windows debugger nowadays) is also made in Lazarus - though I can't seem to come up with anything else that is from the top of my head.

chadcmulligan 5y ago

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