8 ms·

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 RA

by 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.
    - gattilorenz 5y ago
      Are they still extending the language? I remember that working with strings was somewhat frustrating, for example RegExes were not a thing without external libraries...
      - FpUser 5y ago
        >"Are they still extending the language" Yes they are. I do find it strange though to base language acceptance criteria on regex when there are tons of libs. But yes Delphi has its own as well
      - bmn__ 5y ago
        > Are they still extending the language? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22328219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22328219
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      I wonder if The Qt Company is looking at them for inspiration the past couple of years...
    - jcelerier 5y ago
      > their licensing and pricing sucks even more. Does Delphi even have a LGPL option ? Because with Qt's LGPL you can use it in a lot of proprietary systems without having to pay for a license
      - FpUser 5y ago
        I've already said elsewhere that having read their licensing terms and limits on what parts and how it can be used I would not touch QT with the wooden pole. Not interested in discussing those either. Others might disagree but hey each of us makes their own choices. I heard Delphi has free version. I did not go into detail as I own commercial version and keep it up to date. But from what I understand you can use their community edition for free as long as you do not make more than $5000 per year.
- 57844743385 5y ago
  Maybe that’s the only viable business model.
  - jonathanstrange 5y ago
    You can see the same pricing scheme with all of these "batteries included" niche products, from Xojo to LispWorks. It looks like the sweetspot is around $1,500/year, sometimes lower, sometimes higher. I still think they are wrong, though, and these companies would make way more money if they'd cater to the masses at a price range of $30 to $100 per major version (depending on the version/features). In the VST plugin market, price ranges were comparably high until companies figured out that the mass of hobby musicians is more lucrative. Now products are basically on eternal sale, prices reduced from 50% to 95%. In the VST market increased competition forced companies to lower prices during sales. Maybe the lack of competition prevents the same from happening to IDE companies.
    - mark_l_watson 5y ago
      I am not sure that this is fair to LispWorks. I think that I initially paid $3000 for a license and the yearly maintenance fee is about $500. Their support is amazingly good and CAPI is good for UI development.
      - _ph_ 5y ago
        Still, this is just out of range for most non-professionals. Several times I have considered to buy a LispWorks license for personal usage, but couldn't quite justify the costs. I am pretty sure they might even sell more professional licenses if they had a wider userbase of enthusiast users.
        caslon 5y ago
        For anyone curious, a hobbyist license for LispWorks is $500 for a 32-bit version that works on a single operating system, then $250 every year after that. If you actually want to release software other people can use, then it's $1000 and $500 every year after that. If you want to sell software other people can use, double that. Want the ability to use a database? Double it again! Oh, and if you want to release anything but 32-bit software? Double that, too. All of this is per-seat, too. It's really "Our company and or university gives us enough money to blow on software that we don't have to look at the prices"-oriented pricing. LispWorks is amazing software from a development standpoint (though SBCL is significantly faster if you're actually using what you write), but it's also one of the best examples of predatory proprietary software.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  Delphi was my first real programming environment circa 1998. At least at the time it allowed me to build professionally looking applications with practically nil experience and with little effort.
mhd 5y ago
The company has quite a different focus than Borland of old, which tried to get their products in as many hands as possible. Many a programmer was weaned on a cheap copy of Turbo Pascal or Turbo-C. Idera, on the other hand, caters to enterprises. I haven't had a deep look at Delphi in recent years, but if it's the same as ExtJs now (another company bought up by them), I don't see it as a viable option, compared to C# for most small business developers who still need to make UI apps (and on the pure hobbyist end, you've got Lazarus). I leave the language complaints to the Rust brigade.
- tssva 5y ago
  On the hobbyist end there is also the free community edition of Delphi.
  - mhd 5y ago
    That's the one you can't have on the same computer as the community edition of C++ Builder? Yeah. I've been burned by GPL'd ExtJs, I'm not touching Idera's handouts anymore.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  Funny you left the complaints to the brigade. I actually found in Rust what I had been missing from Pascal since my Delphi years: a sane, structured system programming language. Having a Delphi equivalent for Rust would be a dream. The build times are never going to match Pascal's single pass compiler, though.
shimonabi 5y ago
I currently work with a licensed C++ Builder, which uses Delphi libraries. Because of lackluster examples of C++ code, I have to look through Delphi code several times a day on the internet and when I'm debugging.
- rob74 5y ago
  I guess when you use RAD Studio, it's probably better to go "all in" and use the Delphi language too. I tried C++ Builder once while I was working with Delphi, hoping it will be faster than Visual C++. Little did I know that the slow compile times are "baked in" into C/C++ family languages in ways that are hard to get around, so I was disappointed and went right back to Delphi. The Delphi language is (conceptually, not syntactically) not that different from other classical OO languages like C++ or Java, although it (thankfully in my opinion) doesn't have as many bells and whistles. But of course if you have lots of legacy code in C++ Builder, switching is probably not an option...
  - shimonabi 5y ago
    I don't really work with any legacy code, because I'm a new hire and build bespoke applications for customers as a one-man-team. The company I work for has been using Borland since mid-90s, but now I wonder how I should break it to the company that I want to switch to Java.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      You might miss the Delphi's AOT compilation though. There are ways to get it in Java, but other than Graal, they cost just as much.
password4321 5y ago
Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28490736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28490736 2021-09-11 73 points | 163 comments
- coliveira 5y ago
  Unfair competition from Microsoft, that's it.
  - prirun 5y ago
    As much as I hate Microsoft, I'm not sure that's entirely fair. Borland held the Pascal crown with Turbo Pascal. They introduced Turbo C, but IIRC it never really had the success of Turbo Pascal. Borland was known as the Pascal company, not the C company. Meanwhile, Microsoft C, the big version, was what everyone used to develop Windows programs in C. It was on the expensive side, like a few hundred bucks I think. Microsoft came out with Quick Pascal and Quick C, to complement their very-successful QuickBasic product. Quick C was more successful than Borland's Turbo C because Quick C was a hobbyist version of Microsoft C for $99. Microsoft was the C company, Borland was the Pascal company. And C won that argument, not Pascal. Now it could be said that Microsoft had an advantage because it was easier for them to make Quick C compatible with Microsoft C than it was for Borland to make Turbo C exactly compatible with Microsoft C, especially when all Microsoft had to do was change their C features all the time to keep Borland always playing catch-up.
    - coliveira 5y ago
      What MS did to Borland was exactly what they did with Netscape 10 years later: use their dominance of the OS to displace competitors in other areas. The only difference is that computing was a much smaller part of the economy at the time. Things changed with Netscape and other multi-billion dollar web companies, so the government decided to act.
      - prirun 5y ago
        The big difference to me is that with Netscape, Microsoft distributed a free Internet Explorer with Windows just when Netscape was trying to monetize their software. In the case of Borland, Microsoft wasn't distributing free C compilers to compete with Borland's paid compilers. I think the government decided to act because in the case of the browser, they bundled it with Windows, for free, to kill a competitor. But I agree, having Windows on nearly every desktop in the world gives them a way to launch new products that no other software company enjoys, even to this day, except maybe Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.
lelanthran 5y ago
> Apparently they support iOS,Android,Linux, Windows, MacOS including Apple M1 Last I checked two weeks ago there was no Linux support. I still don't see any mention of Linux support.
- vintagedave 5y ago
  Delphi does support Linux: https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Sydney/en/Linux_Application_Development https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Sydney/en/Linux_Ap... It was initially aimed at server-side apps. Despite what the doc there says, you can also create UI apps through FMXLinux, an addon made available along with Delphi when you buy it.
- wila 5y ago
  It's there, but you need an enterprise license...
wila 5y ago
Sure, it still is a thing. They can't keep on releasing new versions if nobody is using it :) I use it and stay up-to-date via their subscriptions. Is it good? Well.. the old VCL stuff is pretty good, very stable, can do pretty much all you want. But that's Windows only. The multi device framework (FMX aka firemonkey) is getting better, but does sometimes still lack in how mature it is. Normally however you can work around any issue you bump into. So is it perfect? No, but I'm not aware of a tool that is perfect when you need cross platform development tools. As far as cost goes (the main complaint I tend to see), it's not very cheap on initial purchase. But with the subscription you basically have a cost of about $500/year for the professional version. Not insurmountable if you consider that they actively work on improving the language and support.
coliveira 5y ago
Delphi and other Embarcadero products are still a thing. In Brazil, Delphi was the number 1 platform for several years, and there are still companies maintaining products using this technology. It was cheap at the time (compared to MS offerings) and very easy to use. Given the large number of products released with this platform, I imagine they will be able to stay in the market for a long time.
magicalhippo 5y ago
We use Delphi to develop and maintain a large Windows desktop application. For that I think it's still pretty darn good. I recently made a new module for our program, with ~300 input fields including custom search inputs, several grids and multiple 3-layer deep details (head-detail-subdetail). I got the UI elements down in less than two days, and had the whole module ready for initial testing in a less than a month, UI to DB. This included a lot of smarts, overview/selection views and other custom dialogs, as well as configurable UI defaults like tabstops, required fields, field colors and default values which vary based on current process (think invoice vs credit note). So yeah, for that kinda stuff it's still pretty great I think. You might want to buy some components, but Delphi itself is expensive so that shouldn't be a huge issue. For the other platforms I'm less sold. I've tried FireMonkey, which is their cross-platform UI framework, and it was tedious and the code did not fill me with confidence (3D math library was mixing various concepts etc). They've had some years to work on it since then, maybe things have improved. But you're forever stuck with non-native on all platforms. The key issue for me is that if you're planning on writing an application with an expected lifetime of 10+ years, like we are, I feel uncomfortable relying on a closed-source tool chain. Delphi works today, but I don't know where it'll be in 5 years time. I can most likely get it to compile in a VM, worst case, but will it generate the code I need?

by mrtksn 5y ago

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.
  - gattilorenz 5y ago
    Are they still extending the language? I remember that working with strings was somewhat frustrating, for example RegExes were not a thing without external libraries...
    - FpUser 5y ago
      >"Are they still extending the language" Yes they are. I do find it strange though to base language acceptance criteria on regex when there are tons of libs. But yes Delphi has its own as well
    - bmn__ 5y ago
      > Are they still extending the language? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22328219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22328219
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    I wonder if The Qt Company is looking at them for inspiration the past couple of years...
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    > their licensing and pricing sucks even more. Does Delphi even have a LGPL option ? Because with Qt's LGPL you can use it in a lot of proprietary systems without having to pay for a license
    - FpUser 5y ago
      I've already said elsewhere that having read their licensing terms and limits on what parts and how it can be used I would not touch QT with the wooden pole. Not interested in discussing those either. Others might disagree but hey each of us makes their own choices. I heard Delphi has free version. I did not go into detail as I own commercial version and keep it up to date. But from what I understand you can use their community edition for free as long as you do not make more than $5000 per year.
57844743385 5y ago
Maybe that’s the only viable business model.
- jonathanstrange 5y ago
  You can see the same pricing scheme with all of these "batteries included" niche products, from Xojo to LispWorks. It looks like the sweetspot is around $1,500/year, sometimes lower, sometimes higher. I still think they are wrong, though, and these companies would make way more money if they'd cater to the masses at a price range of $30 to $100 per major version (depending on the version/features). In the VST plugin market, price ranges were comparably high until companies figured out that the mass of hobby musicians is more lucrative. Now products are basically on eternal sale, prices reduced from 50% to 95%. In the VST market increased competition forced companies to lower prices during sales. Maybe the lack of competition prevents the same from happening to IDE companies.
  - mark_l_watson 5y ago
    I am not sure that this is fair to LispWorks. I think that I initially paid $3000 for a license and the yearly maintenance fee is about $500. Their support is amazingly good and CAPI is good for UI development.
    - _ph_ 5y ago
      Still, this is just out of range for most non-professionals. Several times I have considered to buy a LispWorks license for personal usage, but couldn't quite justify the costs. I am pretty sure they might even sell more professional licenses if they had a wider userbase of enthusiast users.
      - caslon 5y ago
        For anyone curious, a hobbyist license for LispWorks is $500 for a 32-bit version that works on a single operating system, then $250 every year after that. If you actually want to release software other people can use, then it's $1000 and $500 every year after that. If you want to sell software other people can use, double that. Want the ability to use a database? Double it again! Oh, and if you want to release anything but 32-bit software? Double that, too. All of this is per-seat, too. It's really "Our company and or university gives us enough money to blow on software that we don't have to look at the prices"-oriented pricing. LispWorks is amazing software from a development standpoint (though SBCL is significantly faster if you're actually using what you write), but it's also one of the best examples of predatory proprietary software.
lmilcin 5y ago
Delphi was my first real programming environment circa 1998. At least at the time it allowed me to build professionally looking applications with practically nil experience and with little effort.

mhd 5y ago

The company has quite a different focus than Borland of old, which tried to get their products in as many hands as possible. Many a programmer was weaned on a cheap copy of Turbo Pascal or Turbo-C. Idera, on the other hand, caters to enterprises. I haven't had a deep look at Delphi in recent years, but if it's the same as ExtJs now (another company bought up by them), I don't see it as a viable option, compared to C# for most small business developers who still need to make UI apps (and on the pure hobbyist end, you've got Lazarus). I leave the language complaints to the Rust brigade.

tssva 5y ago
On the hobbyist end there is also the free community edition of Delphi.
- mhd 5y ago
  That's the one you can't have on the same computer as the community edition of C++ Builder? Yeah. I've been burned by GPL'd ExtJs, I'm not touching Idera's handouts anymore.
speed_spread 5y ago
Funny you left the complaints to the brigade. I actually found in Rust what I had been missing from Pascal since my Delphi years: a sane, structured system programming language. Having a Delphi equivalent for Rust would be a dream. The build times are never going to match Pascal's single pass compiler, though.

shimonabi 5y ago

I currently work with a licensed C++ Builder, which uses Delphi libraries. Because of lackluster examples of C++ code, I have to look through Delphi code several times a day on the internet and when I'm debugging.

rob74 5y ago
I guess when you use RAD Studio, it's probably better to go "all in" and use the Delphi language too. I tried C++ Builder once while I was working with Delphi, hoping it will be faster than Visual C++. Little did I know that the slow compile times are "baked in" into C/C++ family languages in ways that are hard to get around, so I was disappointed and went right back to Delphi. The Delphi language is (conceptually, not syntactically) not that different from other classical OO languages like C++ or Java, although it (thankfully in my opinion) doesn't have as many bells and whistles. But of course if you have lots of legacy code in C++ Builder, switching is probably not an option...
- shimonabi 5y ago
  I don't really work with any legacy code, because I'm a new hire and build bespoke applications for customers as a one-man-team. The company I work for has been using Borland since mid-90s, but now I wonder how I should break it to the company that I want to switch to Java.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    You might miss the Delphi's AOT compilation though. There are ways to get it in Java, but other than Graal, they cost just as much.

password4321 5y ago

Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28490736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28490736 2021-09-11 73 points | 163 comments

coliveira 5y ago
Unfair competition from Microsoft, that's it.
- prirun 5y ago
  As much as I hate Microsoft, I'm not sure that's entirely fair. Borland held the Pascal crown with Turbo Pascal. They introduced Turbo C, but IIRC it never really had the success of Turbo Pascal. Borland was known as the Pascal company, not the C company. Meanwhile, Microsoft C, the big version, was what everyone used to develop Windows programs in C. It was on the expensive side, like a few hundred bucks I think. Microsoft came out with Quick Pascal and Quick C, to complement their very-successful QuickBasic product. Quick C was more successful than Borland's Turbo C because Quick C was a hobbyist version of Microsoft C for $99. Microsoft was the C company, Borland was the Pascal company. And C won that argument, not Pascal. Now it could be said that Microsoft had an advantage because it was easier for them to make Quick C compatible with Microsoft C than it was for Borland to make Turbo C exactly compatible with Microsoft C, especially when all Microsoft had to do was change their C features all the time to keep Borland always playing catch-up.
  - coliveira 5y ago
    What MS did to Borland was exactly what they did with Netscape 10 years later: use their dominance of the OS to displace competitors in other areas. The only difference is that computing was a much smaller part of the economy at the time. Things changed with Netscape and other multi-billion dollar web companies, so the government decided to act.
    - prirun 5y ago
      The big difference to me is that with Netscape, Microsoft distributed a free Internet Explorer with Windows just when Netscape was trying to monetize their software. In the case of Borland, Microsoft wasn't distributing free C compilers to compete with Borland's paid compilers. I think the government decided to act because in the case of the browser, they bundled it with Windows, for free, to kill a competitor. But I agree, having Windows on nearly every desktop in the world gives them a way to launch new products that no other software company enjoys, even to this day, except maybe Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

lelanthran 5y ago

> Apparently they support iOS,Android,Linux, Windows, MacOS including Apple M1 Last I checked two weeks ago there was no Linux support. I still don't see any mention of Linux support.

vintagedave 5y ago
Delphi does support Linux: https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Sydney/en/Linux_Application_Development https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Sydney/en/Linux_Ap... It was initially aimed at server-side apps. Despite what the doc there says, you can also create UI apps through FMXLinux, an addon made available along with Delphi when you buy it.
wila 5y ago
It's there, but you need an enterprise license...

wila 5y ago

Sure, it still is a thing. They can't keep on releasing new versions if nobody is using it :) I use it and stay up-to-date via their subscriptions. Is it good? Well.. the old VCL stuff is pretty good, very stable, can do pretty much all you want. But that's Windows only. The multi device framework (FMX aka firemonkey) is getting better, but does sometimes still lack in how mature it is. Normally however you can work around any issue you bump into. So is it perfect? No, but I'm not aware of a tool that is perfect when you need cross platform development tools. As far as cost goes (the main complaint I tend to see), it's not very cheap on initial purchase. But with the subscription you basically have a cost of about $500/year for the professional version. Not insurmountable if you consider that they actively work on improving the language and support.

coliveira 5y ago

Delphi and other Embarcadero products are still a thing. In Brazil, Delphi was the number 1 platform for several years, and there are still companies maintaining products using this technology. It was cheap at the time (compared to MS offerings) and very easy to use. Given the large number of products released with this platform, I imagine they will be able to stay in the market for a long time.

magicalhippo 5y ago

We use Delphi to develop and maintain a large Windows desktop application. For that I think it's still pretty darn good. I recently made a new module for our program, with ~300 input fields including custom search inputs, several grids and multiple 3-layer deep details (head-detail-subdetail). I got the UI elements down in less than two days, and had the whole module ready for initial testing in a less than a month, UI to DB. This included a lot of smarts, overview/selection views and other custom dialogs, as well as configurable UI defaults like tabstops, required fields, field colors and default values which vary based on current process (think invoice vs credit note). So yeah, for that kinda stuff it's still pretty great I think. You might want to buy some components, but Delphi itself is expensive so that shouldn't be a huge issue. For the other platforms I'm less sold. I've tried FireMonkey, which is their cross-platform UI framework, and it was tedious and the code did not fill me with confidence (3D math library was mixing various concepts etc). They've had some years to work on it since then, maybe things have improved. But you're forever stuck with non-native on all platforms. The key issue for me is that if you're planning on writing an application with an expected lifetime of 10+ years, like we are, I feel uncomfortable relying on a closed-source tool chain. Delphi works today, but I don't know where it'll be in 5 years time. I can most likely get it to compile in a VM, worst case, but will it generate the code I need?