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Borland's VCL was a great achievement that brought some much needed cohesiveness and sanity to Win32 development in a way that Microsoft was never able to do.
by thought_alarm 5y ago
Borland's VCL was a great achievement that brought some much needed cohesiveness and sanity to Win32 development in a way that Microsoft was never able to do. I've always found it interesting that OpenStep/Cocoa and VCL were released at about the same time in the mid-90s, as they're both so similar.
Even though I was a complete C++ snob at the time, I had to admit that working with Delphi/Pascal projects was surprisingly painless. The compile times were insanely fast.
But I preferred to use the VCL with C++. Well into the 2000s when .NET has completely taken over, I still felt that native VCL/C++ was the best solution for most Windows apps.
- jchw 5y agoI wish I had been exposed to Delphi or at least the VCL earlier. After the fact, it made me feel envious compared to using MFC and whatever else shipped with Visual C++ all the time.
- pjmlp 5y agoOWL did it first, also from Borland. To this day Microsoft sucks in what concerns C++ frameworks for Windows development, with C++/CX and WinRT they kind of finally nailed it, but then a group managed to bomb that effort. Most likely the same kind of devs that also bombed Longhorn efforts.