41 ms·

Delphi still exists and is actively developed

165 points by psim1 4y ago

kaiken1987 4y ago
Delphi and it's components are still nice. But their C++Builder seems like if just keeps getting worse. Instead of maintaining the Borland compiler and debugger they've been replacing it with new ones that work about a quarter as well.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Still fairs better than anything Microsoft has done with C++ tooling for GUI development.
- gduke 4y ago
  The move to Clang was to support C++11 and C++17 language features. The classic Borland compiler was stuck at C++03. The debugger situation has slowly been improving but there is a unification of using LLDB for all platforms.
jollyllama 4y ago
I remember, as a kid, looking up examples of malware. Bots and trojans and such. Invariably, much of it was in Delphi. Why was this so?
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  Simple low-level language, high-quality IDE. Why not.
  - jsmolka 4y ago
    Calling RAD Studio a high-quality IDE seems like a stretch to me. I would choose VS Code or a JetBrains product any day of the week. Unfortunately you a kinda stuck with it when developing in Delphi.
    - jollyllama 4y ago
      I think the .net ecosystem, as a higher level language, was probably less fit for the task.
      - rndgermandude 4y ago
        When I started using C++Builder (and some Delphi), .net did not exist
    - mhd 4y ago
      I would assume that "as a kid", when malware was written in Delphi, those weren't really options. (And VS of that era was rather meh...)
      - jollyllama 4y ago
        Yeah, I'm referring to the late XP / early Vista era.
    - croes 4y ago
      Maybe RAD Studio isn't a high quality IDE but at least it is an IDE. VS Code isn't.
      - badsectoracula 4y ago
        I remember being a little impressed when in some version of C++ Builder i used a symbol from another source file and when i pressed Ctrl+S to save it, the editor automatically added the necessary #include file at the top. This is the mark of an IDE that actually knows the language it is editing. The closest i've seen elsewhere is QtCreator littering the code with red error messages about the unknown symbol while i'm typing the code together with a lightbulb next to the line with it which, if i click on, it adds the #include. From a technical perspective the ability seems to be there, it just doesn't feel as smooth and seamless. Not to mention all these errors that appear while i'm typing make me anxious - like, STFU, i know the code is wrong, i'll fix it once i finish typing this part :-P.
    - 4y ago
- bikingbismuth 4y ago
  Not sure why, but when I worked for a large fintech a couple years ago, we regularly saw banking Trojans built in Delphi.
  - jollyllama 4y ago
    Yes, that's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about.
- thijsvandien 4y ago
  Mostly because it builds self-contained executables that are virtually guaranteed to work. Nowadays this is much less of a thing, but we are talking about the day and age of DLL Hell.
- optymizer 4y ago
  At least in the ex-soviet countries, a lot of the legally-questionable software we used to write was in Pascal because that's what we learnt in school. It was an easy transition to go to Delphi - nice RAD IDE for GUI RATs or keygens/cracks, familiar OO language.
  - jollyllama 4y ago
    Makes sense. Thanks.
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    Even in the West, Pascal was the standard teaching language even in the late 1980s -- my undergraduate classes and textbooks all used it.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      I took the AP CS test in 1996 and had to learn Pascal for it. They switched to a different language either in '97 or '98 though (C++ I think?).
      - jollyllama 4y ago
        I think so. By the late 2000's, it was Java.
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  Most Delphi examples I see these days are actually modern, recently written malware samples. It statically compiles into a tiny binary which has a weird ABI which flies under the radar of AV software looking for programs up to no good. What's not to love for this purpose if you are an adversarial actor? The vega/buran strain of ransomware malware comes to mind as a well known example from the past few years [1] [1] https://www.acronis.com/en-us/blog/posts/meet-buran-new-delphi-ransomware-delivered-rig-exploit-kit/ https://www.acronis.com/en-us/blog/posts/meet-buran-new-delp...
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    > Most Delphi examples I see these days are actually modern, recently written malware samples. It statically compiles into a tiny binary which has a weird ABI which flies under the radar of AV software looking for programs up to no good. What's not to love for this purpose if you are an adversarial actor? And recently lots of malware detection has started looking for that "weird" ABI signature, so now everyone's anti-virus is throwing up alarms at perfectly legit age-old software just because it's built with Delphi.
crypt1d 4y ago
I'd love to go back to Delphi and play with it again as I did back in the day, but the price tag kills the mood pretty quickly.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  You can use it for free with the community edition (https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter) if your revenue is less than $5,000.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Just get Lazarus.
    - hunterx 4y ago
      Lazarus? Do you have a reference/link?
      - andsoitis 4y ago
        https://www.lazarus-ide.org https://www.lazarus-ide.org
      - badsectoracula 4y ago
        Here: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ It is basically open source and cross platform Delphi (there are a bunch of differences but from a high level perspective i think that it describes it fine for people who already know Delphi). Also check this video i made a few years ago[0] making a simple puzzle game in Lazarus. You can skip to 11:30 if you don't care about downloading, compiling and configuring it and just want to see it in action. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_01Xhd2EJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_01Xhd2EJM
    - chinabot 4y ago
      Agree. If someone is paying you a shit-tonne of money to write a program then get Delphi Professional for US$1400, its still a good product, the more expensive $5K client/server/architect versions are not worth it at any price as third party delphi libraries for database and reports are cheaper and far superior (devart/fastreports/etc) You can do the same with Lazarus without any external libraries. I wrote a fairly polished production system for a seafood factory in Lazarus 15 years ago which is still in daily use. Amazing what a single developer with the right tool can achieve, shame we cant get any young people interested in anything but apps.
mikewarot 4y ago
I miss Delphi.... even though I've got it installed. I can't bring myself to use it. The "free" version has a hook in it that just doesn't sit well with me... they want a cut of any money I make with it, on their terms. It's easier for me to ignore it, and just put up with the limited documentation of Lazarus. I miss the days when I could afford Delphi.
- proxysna 4y ago
  Use Lazarus. Free and Opensource clone of Delphi
kerblang 4y ago
I used Delphi years and years ago and it was great for building GUI applications quickly and easily. Much nicer than Visual Basic. I probably wouldn't recognize it now, other than I suppose it's still Object Pascal, which is a very good programming language, all things considered; straightforward, not too fancy, not too dumbed down. Free edition: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter
- KindOne 4y ago
  Be warned: You need to enter a valid phone number. They will call you asking on what you plan on building with the software. I've had that happen to me within a few days of downloading the software. Another person had the same experience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582890
  - martin_a 4y ago
    Could you accidentally mistype the phone number or do you need it for something?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - KindOne 4y ago
      I don't know.
  - ChildOfChaos 4y ago
    Why would you ever put in your real phone number anyway?
    - KindOne 4y ago
      Some websites I have signed up require a real phone number so they send a verification code on account creation.
KingOfCoders 4y ago
Only the best memories for Delphi.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
For me when Borland became Embarcadero, it seemed like it lost it’s scrappy hacker ethos. Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Delphi, C++ Builder were all very innovative products that catered to the individual developer. The Embarcadero rebrand seems like a turn towards Enterprise. For me now, JetBrains is the new Borland, a scrappy company with a strong focus on what individual developers need and consistently turning out excellent software.
- behnamoh 4y ago
  I still remember Borland’s logo and icons. Something about the 90s and 00s was special and maybe we didn’t appreciate it enough.
  - browningstreet 4y ago
    Those Borland books, too. I lived with those Turbo Pascal books.
- wenc 4y ago
  Borland pivoted to enterprise long before this thing called Embarcadero. Recall it renamed itself Inprise before renaming itself back to Borland. Also Embarcadero isn’t Borland. They acquired Borland’s product lines but not Borland itself.
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    And the original company seems, name change notwithstanding, to have stuck with the "Enterprise"-y mentality of Inprise.
- bluedino 4y ago
  I'm sure they made a great amount of money doing Turbo C/Pascal via mail order but that market is only so big. You need the $1,200 compiler suites to make the real cash.
- nottorp 4y ago
  JetBrains is subscription pricing now.
therealmarv 4y ago
I still have the feeling it's the most productive way to create beautiful native Windows desktop programs. Rapid application development is not an empty promise here. All my other endeavours with UI programming (Java/Swing, HTML/JS frontends, QT) felt way less productive. Maybe MS C# is the closest to Delphi nowadays.
- yakubin 4y ago
  I wonder if anyone here has experience with both Delphi and SwiftUI. I'd be curious to know which one is more comfortable.
  - sarsway 4y ago
    Well there's a reason all the WYSIWYG UI editors died out. They are a quick way to whip up a passable UI, but usually turns out to be quite ugly under the hood, hard to reuse, and a pain to maintain. Delphi is really from a different age, simpler times, when the common paradigm was having the app directly connected to some sort of SQL database, which serves as a stable, static data source for the UI. Making glorified database editors is what it was really good at. These days.. things changed. UIs need to be flexible, reactive, reusable, adaptable. UIs that can handle uncertain states, asynchronous data flows, change dynamically and so on. SwiftUI / React / Flutter all ended up at the same paradigm, it's a much more advanced way of doing things. Also, high level languages are much more pleasant to work with.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Only by those that never bother to learn how to use layout managers.
    - wizofaus 4y ago
      > They are a quick way to whip up a passable UI, but usually turns out to be quite ugly under the hood, hard to reuse, and a pain to maintain That's not my memory at all - even web-based traditional ASP apps made it relatively easy to use WYSIWYG form editors that modified the code as needed. But expectations around how dynamic UIs are supposed to be have changed. SPAs in particular are not very amenable to auto-code generation, but supposedly some options do exist (retool? Haven't tried it though).
giancarlostoro 4y ago
It does still exist, and I'd love to try it out, but I'm not throwing down thousands of dollars when it costs significantly less for me to get Visual Studio Pro as a single developer ($30 a month iirc) or you know... $120 for JetBrains IDE's annually (after 3 years) it makes no sense for me to throw down a thousand dollars (per year?) same with you Qt. I'm looking to evaluate your product and prototype and maybe build small projects that need a UI but your pricing scheme is not for people like me at all. One would likely argue that JetBrains probably isnt a RAD IDE, but Visual Studio definitely is fully capable of RAD editing capabilities, think WinForms.
- marticode 4y ago
  They have a free community edition for individuals.
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    I tried it out and it wasn't exactly stable. Someone from Embarcadero that was mostly marketing reached out to me and I told them I had issues, they just tried to sell me a license instead of taking the time to get someone technical to talk to me. Not sure I want to buy a license from someone who doesn't invest more into ensuring their primary customer base gets the help they need. I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to build anything commercial under their free tier if I wanted to, so if I want to see if something would be worthwhile now I have to take a thousand dollar gamble as opposed to $30 a month with Visual Studio Pro, or even $120 with JetBrains. Update: Looks like JetBrains is $149 per year, and moving forward after October 2022 it will be $173 per year.
mhd 4y ago
...for the enterprise. Which is okay, there's plenty of mixed quality software for that sector. It's just that Delphi used to be a lot more oriented towards beginner to small-business developers. And note that this happened before the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs. If it was all about a reduced audience for desktop-based applications and then supporting that, I would understand it more. I haven't been following Delphi itself, but the parent company also manages ExtJS, which is aimed/priced similarly, yet with support/quality that doesn't justify this. Weird that outside of the BCPL or ML families, it's Ada that seems to be the one with the most momentum these days.
- alyandon 4y ago
  the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs Application development has gone backwards so much compared to the RAD tooling from the 90s. I really can't even properly describe it to the younger generation. :(
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    ah the GUI designers from Borland, light years ahead of everything else... it just worked and looked nice (compared to Microsoft shitshow that was Visual Studio back then), was very easy to learn and its the only thing in software I've seen in 20 years which deserved the title RAD.
    - vbezhenar 4y ago
      Delphi cut the corners with their fixed positioning. It will not work for web and it works very poorly for localization (labels change their lengths and can overlap over each other). As soon as you introduce layouts to your UI, all the Delphi simplicity goes out of the window. This is an interesting challenge to invent a way for UI to be pixel-fixed, yet work in web and with localization. If someone would do that, you could rebuild Delphi for web. I guess one way is to build a pixel-fixed form for English language and let AI to build a layout for this form.
      - 4y ago
minsight 4y ago
Embarcadero was acquired by the same jackasses that bought out a company where I used to work. The new owners had a bunch of attitude and kept crowing on about "their playbook". It turned out that the primary technology that they were buying us for was the one part of our product that we actually licensed from another vendor. I believe they spent millions and didn't get what they were looking for. They had an offshore team that theoretically could work with the codebase, but I don't remember seeing anything of consequence added to the product in the past 7-8 years. If I ever found that they bought out a company that used technology that I depended upon, I'd migrate to a new solution.
- last_responder 4y ago
  So in your opinion, this should be avoided? Looking to try something new ( old ) and this got me excited but your comment has soured it a bit for me.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    Yeah, if you want something like Delphi, try Lazarus instead which -for the most part- is basically an open source and cross platform Delphi clone[0], so you're not bound to the whims of a corporation that is often seen as where old proprietary software goes to die. [0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
  - minsight 4y ago
    I wouldn't expect much in terms of value or growth from a platform owned by those clowns.
  - gduke 4y ago
    Since Embarcacero was acquired in 2015 and until now, there has happened quite a bit to the RAD Studio IDE and underlying tech. I don't know about your situation, but, Delphi and C++Builder has not been left to rot.
cosmotic 4y ago
I remember one of the great things about delphi was that it statically linked everything into the single .exe making it totally self contained. A Windows GUI program could be a couple hundred KB, no other DLLs required. C/C++ could do the same but you were stuck with nasty raw win32 calls and a lower level language.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  FWIW C++ Builder could do the same and had access to VCL too. AFAIK (never tried it) you could mix Delphi and C++ in the same project if you wanted.
  - rndgermandude 4y ago
    yes, you could/can. The VCL itself was written in Delphi and seamlessly linked with C++Builder C++ (they had some language extensions to make it work)
  - cosmotic 4y ago
    Over the years the minimum size of VCL apps increased. Last I checked (10 years ago maybe) it was like 1MB or more compared to 200KB or so in Delphi 3.
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      Almost certainly is the extended RTTI information - VCL is huge after all and relies heavily on RTTI. The forms, objects, etc you are editing in the form designer are not just stand-ins like in, e.g. Glade, wxFormBuilder, QtDesigner or similar tools, they are live instances of the actual objects that are serialized on disk whenever you save the project with the serialized data becoming part of the program's resources and are deserialized when the program starts (VCL/Delphi calls this "object streaming"). This means that the full RTTI information needed to serialize and deserialize the objects (and any other object) needs to be part of the executable. At some point they extended the RTTI information so that you can also make dynamic calls to methods, obtain fields, etc so the RTTI data became larger. Lazarus adds a ton more data to the executables so where you'd get a 1MB in some recent Delphi, you'd probably get something like a 5MB executable with Lazarus (without debugging information - that'd make it much larger) on Windows. On Linux it can be even larger, e.g. the simple calculator shown here[0] (up left window) is ~2.88MB, stripped. [0] https://i.imgur.com/MkfN4pO.png https://i.imgur.com/MkfN4pO.png
omgmajk 4y ago
I have used Lazarus in the last year, it's very ugly but it gets the job done.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
You know a modern company is active when there’s a photo of a black lady with natural hair holding a laptop by a server room.
- pipeline_peak 4y ago
  Cont'd : Then you walk into the Delphi office and it's just a bunch of Nordic academic guys with grey hair.
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    My hair is still dark; it's just the beard that's mostly grey nowadays. Signed, Sid Dabster
shimonabi 4y ago
I'm working with the Delphi libraries every day in C++ Builder, bucause my company bet on Turbo C++ and Builder in the 90s, when Microsoft technologies seemed primitive compared to it. At a recent meetup in my country, 90% of Delphi developers were over 60 years old. Also, Embarcadero licenses aren't cheap.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  Where do you live?
- GnarfGnarf 4y ago
  We also started with Borland C++ 3.1 in the 90s. The GUI IDE was mind-blowing at the time. It was superior to MS' Workbench. However, Borland really dropped the ball with C++ 4.5, and we had to switch to Visual Studio.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
marcodiego 4y 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.
- api 4y ago
  They should break off and commercialize just the cross-platform GUI and rapid development IDE for that and put a language like Go under it. Go with a good RAD IDE would be so amazing, like yank out my wallet and throw money at you while shaking amazing. Give me a good cross platform GUI. Give me a good IDE for it. Don't make me learn yet another fucking programming language that exists nowhere else to use it. The last part counts against this and also against Flutter, which forces you to learn Dart which is used nowhere but Flutter. What would have been wrong with Go or TypeScript? People already know those. Most successful languages are open source for very clear reasons, but a cross platform IDE is something that could very well justify being commercial. It's an absolute ton of work and a constant moving target to support. So far no pure open source effort has managed to succeed unless you count the various HTML-based GUI systems that are indirectly subsidized by Google and Apple.
  - shrubble 4y ago
aaa_aaa 4y ago
AFAIK they signed a deal with education ministry of Turkey so that Delphi will be taught as the programming language in technical high schools.
- pawelmurias 4y ago
  Super evil
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    > Super evil ...On the part of the Turkish Ministry of Education, which figured out that they'd get legions of young programmers all primed to jump ship to Free Pascal / Lazarus? Naah -- smart, but not exactly evil. :-)
  - aaa_aaa 4y ago
    Not necessarily. I think Delphi with visual programming is ok for students. High school kids like immediate visual feedback and ease of use. Probably deal does not involve money.
marcodiego 4y ago
The linked page may be a snapashot of what delphi became: the video autoplays; controls disappear spontaneously with no obvious way to bring them back; most of the initial time in the video is spent showing the welcome screen: you can now set the background image and theme!; it has lots of text in the form of images, one of these says "Support for 4k+ Screens. Welcome to the future!"; the download button puts you in a page where you have to enter a lot of personal information and prove your are not a robot.
cowmix 4y ago
I remember going to a convention in 2005 for retail store software and I was amazed that Delphi dominated as the platform for POS systems.
- LeonB 4y ago
  I knew a pharmacist who wrote his own POS software in Delphi. It (and Visual Basic) had that position where they were so usable that even someone whose fulltime job was something else would be able to single handedly make a line of business app for that business.
  - slt2021 4y ago
    it is amazing that you could just drop edit boxes and labels, hook up to data source and database and it will work without a single line of code written!
unixhero 4y ago
Both Embarcadero.com and Lazarus project homepage refers to that they have the capability of RAD. Lazarus - "RAD - Rapid Application Development." Embarcadero - "RAD Server - Reduces the complexities of rapidly building and deploying a multi-tier turn-key enterprise REST API application server with Swagger support." What does RAD refer to? What is it actually?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- andsoitis 4y ago
  What is RAD? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  > What does RAD refer to? Rapid Application Development :-P. Wikipedia has an article[0], but in general it can probably be thought as a precursor to agile (the article says that agile is a RAD method) in that instead of doing some lengthy pre/planing process you use an iterative approach that adapts to what the users want. In this particular case Lazarus is a RAD IDE in the sense that it allows quick development and iteration of functional GUIs - Delphi was also like that but at some point Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero/Whoever made it more of a name to use for their products ("RAD Studio") than something that describes them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development
panki27 4y ago
One of the best aspects of Delphi is how quickly you can whip together simple GUI applications. The main issue nowadays is finding helpful resources on the internet, as hardly anybody writes Delphi anymore. For the interested, a free Delphi IDE exists (comes with FreePascal compiler): https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
- hengheng 4y ago
  Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? Something that lets me draw a window with two number fields and a button that says "return sum", but it's two minutes of work and self-explanatory.
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    > Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? As the GP said, FP / Lazarus.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    > As someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? Maybe hard pressed to call it modern, but WinForms is still my go to for quickly making a UI, at least in Windows.
    - Joker_vD 4y ago
      Same here. I've tried to pick up WPF but holy fatcats, what an explosion of XAML files in exchange for... pretty much nothing, really. It's a shame, really.
      - the_only_law 4y ago
        I would almost like XAML, if it wasn’t for styling. If it had some CSS like DSL, I’d use it more, but unfortunately overcrowding styles invokes nasty blobs of XML boilerplate often having to override stuff that doesn’t seem relevant to what you want to do.
bena 4y ago
Wow. It looks just like Visual Studio... 6. I have fond memories of Pascal, it's the language of the first programming class I took. But yeah. The website and the screenshots do not inspire confidence.
scrapcode 4y ago
I have fond memories of using Borland's Delphi when I was a much younger boy. GUI building tools such as Delphi, VS, JavaFX and the old Dreamweaver really helped certain concepts click for me at that age.
lord-squirrel 4y ago
Denmark's farming industry's ERP system run on a system called Ø90 which is written delphi, java and cobol. Still being actively maintained by IBM today.
nottorp 4y ago
It may exist but at that price tag only large companies with legacy applications will keep using it.
VikingCoder 4y ago
Delphi was great, until C# and WinForms came along. Then there was honestly no reason for me to use Delphi again. All the other UI junk in Visual Studio is terrible in comparison, for me.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  They still don't offer AOT compilation and low level coding as good as Delphi, even with the upcoming .NET 7 improvements. Native AOT will only support command line applications, and shared libraries. Pity that they decided to kill .NET Native.
- innocentoldguy 4y ago
  I continued using Delphi. I never liked C# or WinForms much. They felt too VB for me.
magicalhippo 4y ago
We use Delphi at work. We've gotten a lot of pressure from customers to move to the web. However the lack of ways to design non-trivial UIs quickly does not make it seen feasible at the moment. Then there's the fact that Win32 is like bedrock in terms of stability. We've got forms that's been designed and coded over 15 years ago which still works just as fine as they did back then. We've got input-heavy UIs, the one I'm working on right now is a single window with >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids. Getting the UI layout done and components connected to the DB will take me a day tops, it'll look great and based on history should work for the next 10+ years. The web seems like such a step back whenever I try it.
- yrgulation 4y ago
  “ >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids” Yeah i’ve built single page apps with more input fields than this and grid tables all in a single view. Are you sure this cant be easily done? Coincidentally that was first 15 years ago with extjs, second time with react 3 years ago - the latter being a slower process but still pretty much doable.
  - liveoneggs 4y ago
    Does #1 still work?
    - yrgulation 4y ago
      It did until roughly 5 years ago. From what i found by googling the product was acquired by a larger competitor and then decommissioned in favour of an existing product. The benefit in web based uis is that they work on any platform a supporting browser can be installed. And if you understand js it can work for a very very long time.
  - magicalhippo 4y ago
    > Are you sure this cant be easily done? No, I'm no web expert. We've not found a way so far, and I've not seen something like this on the web, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. edit: to clarify, I don't doubt one can get 150 fields in a view on the web. But can one dev do it in one day and have it look great?
runjake 4y ago
Similarly, Windows Forms[1] still exists and is still being developed. Yeah, it was "deprecated" by Microsoft[2], but it's since been "un-deprecated". Windows Forms is C# and borrows heavily from Delphi's Rapid Application Development (RAD) style. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Forms 2. http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/WPF-QA http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/WPF-QA
kaba0 4y ago
Could someone please explain/describe how GUI creation was done with Delphi? I tried to look up a video/wiki page but I don’t see what kind of abstraction did it use and why was it as liked?
- spapas82 4y ago
  You can try the lazarus ide https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ since it is more or less an open source version of delphi. Tldr; it's a similar experience to vb6: drag n drop controls into a form, edit their properties and write code for their events...
- unnouinceput 4y ago
  You mean how you open Delphi IDE, create a new project (default is Windows VCL, but you can also do cross-platform FireMonkey just as easy), then when the main form is presented in IDE how you drop components from the components palette? As in same way you do it in Visual Studio when doing a WPF and or/ Winforms project as well? Or as in any visual IDE for any programming language, because they all follow the same idea?
  - kaba0 4y ago
    I guess? I was interested in whether it had some unique feature/paradigm, or was it loved for some other reason.
    - CRConrad 4y ago
      > I was interested in whether it had some unique feature/paradigm, or was it loved for some other reason. It was so beloved because it actually worked exactly as the marketing slogan at the time claimed: "The power of C++ with the ease of Visual Basic". (Or was it the other way around?) This was a time when Microsoft's "Visual" Studio IDE was anything but: It had no visual form builder, just a code editor. To actually put something on screen, you had to write reams of code straight out of a Charles Petzold tome. Visual Basic, OTOH, sure did have a nice easy graphical UI builder, but a pathetically weak ultra-high-level language -- in contrast to Object Pascal, which is every bit as high- or as low-level as C++. I learned all three in an "Object Oriented Programming" course I took in 1995, IIRC in the order 1: OO concepts, 2: C++, 3: VB, 4: Delphi (or was it 2: VB, 3: C++?). After the two preceding, Delphi was a revelation and love at first sight. That love soured slightly after the Kylix debacle, some more with diverse bugginess and drawn-out implementation of Windows developments (Unicode, 64-bit, High-DPI...), and finally petered out almost totally over the covert "feature moved to higher-priced more Enterprise-y edition" and overt price hikes over the years (decades) since, with the on-again off-again free (gratis) Community Edition shenanigans as perhaps the final nail in the coffin. But Delphi versions 1 through 7 (1995 -- ca 2005-10) still has, and probably will for ever have, a special place in my heart as my most beloved programming tool. And fortunately, it has a worthy heir in Free Pascal / Lazarus. HTH!
29athrowaway 4y ago
If you want Delphi to succeed you have to win the developers. The Embarcadero website experience for a developer is nonsense. The first thing you see in the page is "BUY NOW", "FREE TRIAL". It's so aggressive that my instant reaction is to close the product page before I even get to see what the product is about. And no, I don't want a "product demo". I don't want to contact sales. I am a developer I don't care about that. "Contact sales"/"Request a product demo" sounds intimidating. It sounds like you want me to spend $5000, which I am not willing to spend. My primary objective as a developer is to develop applications. The website has to focus on assisting that process.
archielc 4y ago
I used Borland Delphi (as well as C++ Builder for some period) throughout my university times for all kinds of home works and hobby apps. It was extremely easy to build simple but still good-looking UIs. At some point I even had a small reusable library for graph problems (add/edit nodes/edges with nice arrows/labels etc.) What I really liked was how fast you could get to real coding part with minimum boilerplate. Happy to see Lazarus IDE still having a strong community.
Double_a_92 4y ago
If only debugging worked properly, especially in 64bit applications...
_8j50 4y ago
For the unaware delphi packers are somewhat popular with malware authors.
jamier1978 4y ago
A significant amount of Delphi code I wrote 20+ years ago is still in the wild and still making a ton of money for a company I used to work for. I actually miss the days of Windows desktop development. Good Times.
- chinabot 4y ago
  All my future developments will be in Lazarus but I have one mega-client with a big Delphi production program I have to keep happy for the foreseeable future or until their large team of developers and advisors can decide which language/platform/infrastructure etc they want to redevelop it in. 3+ years of consultants and meetings but not one line of code so far :-)
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    Put in a bid to port it to FP/Lazarus? (Oh, you already did that? ;-)
elzbardico 4y ago
Borland was just another example of Death-By-MBA.
Kaibeezy 4y ago
Editorialized title. It really does detract from the discussion. Let us reach our own judgments. Or am I missing something?
hankman86 4y ago
I still have a warm spot in my heart for Delphi. When I bought a license for Delphi 1.0 running on Windows 3.1, it was like a revelation to me. Having previously used Borland Pascal on DOS, I found it unbelievable how easy developing Windows UIs can be. I developed a 16-bit business app (accounting, inventory management, customer records) on Delphi 1.0 which is still running today (you need a 32 bit version of Windows 7 though). The bundled Borland Database Engine (Paradox desktop) was decent enough for structured data management in a single-user application. The best feature was the compiler that sprinted through my source code, turning it into a statically linked executable in mere seconds (on a Pentium 60). While I have long moved on from Pascal, many great ideas of Delphi live on in C# and Typescript.
- RachelF 4y ago
  Except the small statically linked executable. C# needs .NET which has its very own circle of dll hell with compatibility and confusion version numbers for your users.
kokizzu2 4y ago
US$ 1,599 XD not using windows, delphi, c++ anymore so, no..
unpeasant 4y ago
Went for a job interview last year and the tech stack was an API built in Delphi, on Macs, using a virtual machine running Windows. Company was doing well from it, but trying to scale, and finding anyone to code delphi was impossible.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  Throw me a link or a mail, gotta see if they're still looking.
- jamier1978 4y ago
  As someone who worked with Delphi for many years I've often wondered if there is a lot of money to be made by charging companies to work on these codebases. As much as I liked Delphi back in the day, low job satisfaction puts me off looking in to the idea.
LorenPechtel 4y ago
So what if it does? In the old days I loved them. Then I found myself using older versions despite having newer ones because of important bugs. Then came 64 bit code. They were years late in releasing a compiler that could produce 64 bit code and the reaction from the company seemed to be that it's a tiny portion of the users that need it. Never mind that for that not-so-tiny portion (you might have no direct need of 64 bit address space but if you have to play nice with 64 bit code you have to be 64 bit--plugins) it was a total showstopper, companies relying on it were dead in the water, had to to a total rewrite or die. I got the strong feeling that they were looking at us customers as a resource to be milked, not supported. My employer at the time died in the housing collapse, while I still have a couple of little Delphi apps around that I wrote I haven't touched it since then. C# was almost as good (and at this point all that's missing are arrays with an enum index and arrays that don't start at zero) and has much better support.

165 points by psim1 4y ago

kaiken1987 4y ago

Delphi and it's components are still nice. But their C++Builder seems like if just keeps getting worse. Instead of maintaining the Borland compiler and debugger they've been replacing it with new ones that work about a quarter as well.

pjmlp 4y ago
Still fairs better than anything Microsoft has done with C++ tooling for GUI development.
gduke 4y ago
The move to Clang was to support C++11 and C++17 language features. The classic Borland compiler was stuck at C++03. The debugger situation has slowly been improving but there is a unification of using LLDB for all platforms.

jollyllama 4y ago

I remember, as a kid, looking up examples of malware. Bots and trojans and such. Invariably, much of it was in Delphi. Why was this so?

vbezhenar 4y ago
Simple low-level language, high-quality IDE. Why not.
- jsmolka 4y ago
  Calling RAD Studio a high-quality IDE seems like a stretch to me. I would choose VS Code or a JetBrains product any day of the week. Unfortunately you a kinda stuck with it when developing in Delphi.
  - jollyllama 4y ago
    I think the .net ecosystem, as a higher level language, was probably less fit for the task.
    - rndgermandude 4y ago
      When I started using C++Builder (and some Delphi), .net did not exist
  - mhd 4y ago
    I would assume that "as a kid", when malware was written in Delphi, those weren't really options. (And VS of that era was rather meh...)
    - jollyllama 4y ago
      Yeah, I'm referring to the late XP / early Vista era.
  - croes 4y ago
    Maybe RAD Studio isn't a high quality IDE but at least it is an IDE. VS Code isn't.
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      I remember being a little impressed when in some version of C++ Builder i used a symbol from another source file and when i pressed Ctrl+S to save it, the editor automatically added the necessary #include file at the top. This is the mark of an IDE that actually knows the language it is editing. The closest i've seen elsewhere is QtCreator littering the code with red error messages about the unknown symbol while i'm typing the code together with a lightbulb next to the line with it which, if i click on, it adds the #include. From a technical perspective the ability seems to be there, it just doesn't feel as smooth and seamless. Not to mention all these errors that appear while i'm typing make me anxious - like, STFU, i know the code is wrong, i'll fix it once i finish typing this part :-P.
  - 4y ago
bikingbismuth 4y ago
Not sure why, but when I worked for a large fintech a couple years ago, we regularly saw banking Trojans built in Delphi.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Yes, that's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about.
thijsvandien 4y ago
Mostly because it builds self-contained executables that are virtually guaranteed to work. Nowadays this is much less of a thing, but we are talking about the day and age of DLL Hell.
optymizer 4y ago
At least in the ex-soviet countries, a lot of the legally-questionable software we used to write was in Pascal because that's what we learnt in school. It was an easy transition to go to Delphi - nice RAD IDE for GUI RATs or keygens/cracks, familiar OO language.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Makes sense. Thanks.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  Even in the West, Pascal was the standard teaching language even in the late 1980s -- my undergraduate classes and textbooks all used it.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I took the AP CS test in 1996 and had to learn Pascal for it. They switched to a different language either in '97 or '98 though (C++ I think?).
    - jollyllama 4y ago
      I think so. By the late 2000's, it was Java.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
Most Delphi examples I see these days are actually modern, recently written malware samples. It statically compiles into a tiny binary which has a weird ABI which flies under the radar of AV software looking for programs up to no good. What's not to love for this purpose if you are an adversarial actor? The vega/buran strain of ransomware malware comes to mind as a well known example from the past few years [1] [1] https://www.acronis.com/en-us/blog/posts/meet-buran-new-delphi-ransomware-delivered-rig-exploit-kit/ https://www.acronis.com/en-us/blog/posts/meet-buran-new-delp...
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > Most Delphi examples I see these days are actually modern, recently written malware samples. It statically compiles into a tiny binary which has a weird ABI which flies under the radar of AV software looking for programs up to no good. What's not to love for this purpose if you are an adversarial actor? And recently lots of malware detection has started looking for that "weird" ABI signature, so now everyone's anti-virus is throwing up alarms at perfectly legit age-old software just because it's built with Delphi.

crypt1d 4y ago

I'd love to go back to Delphi and play with it again as I did back in the day, but the price tag kills the mood pretty quickly.

andsoitis 4y ago
You can use it for free with the community edition (https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter) if your revenue is less than $5,000.
- anthk 4y ago
  Just get Lazarus.
  - hunterx 4y ago
    Lazarus? Do you have a reference/link?
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      https://www.lazarus-ide.org https://www.lazarus-ide.org
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      Here: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ It is basically open source and cross platform Delphi (there are a bunch of differences but from a high level perspective i think that it describes it fine for people who already know Delphi). Also check this video i made a few years ago[0] making a simple puzzle game in Lazarus. You can skip to 11:30 if you don't care about downloading, compiling and configuring it and just want to see it in action. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_01Xhd2EJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_01Xhd2EJM
  - chinabot 4y ago
    Agree. If someone is paying you a shit-tonne of money to write a program then get Delphi Professional for US$1400, its still a good product, the more expensive $5K client/server/architect versions are not worth it at any price as third party delphi libraries for database and reports are cheaper and far superior (devart/fastreports/etc) You can do the same with Lazarus without any external libraries. I wrote a fairly polished production system for a seafood factory in Lazarus 15 years ago which is still in daily use. Amazing what a single developer with the right tool can achieve, shame we cant get any young people interested in anything but apps.

mikewarot 4y ago

I miss Delphi.... even though I've got it installed. I can't bring myself to use it. The "free" version has a hook in it that just doesn't sit well with me... they want a cut of any money I make with it, on their terms. It's easier for me to ignore it, and just put up with the limited documentation of Lazarus. I miss the days when I could afford Delphi.

proxysna 4y ago
Use Lazarus. Free and Opensource clone of Delphi

kerblang 4y ago

I used Delphi years and years ago and it was great for building GUI applications quickly and easily. Much nicer than Visual Basic. I probably wouldn't recognize it now, other than I suppose it's still Object Pascal, which is a very good programming language, all things considered; straightforward, not too fancy, not too dumbed down. Free edition: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

KindOne 4y ago
Be warned: You need to enter a valid phone number. They will call you asking on what you plan on building with the software. I've had that happen to me within a few days of downloading the software. Another person had the same experience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582890
- martin_a 4y ago
  Could you accidentally mistype the phone number or do you need it for something?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - KindOne 4y ago
    I don't know.
- ChildOfChaos 4y ago
  Why would you ever put in your real phone number anyway?
  - KindOne 4y ago
    Some websites I have signed up require a real phone number so they send a verification code on account creation.

KingOfCoders 4y ago

Only the best memories for Delphi.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

For me when Borland became Embarcadero, it seemed like it lost it’s scrappy hacker ethos. Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Delphi, C++ Builder were all very innovative products that catered to the individual developer. The Embarcadero rebrand seems like a turn towards Enterprise. For me now, JetBrains is the new Borland, a scrappy company with a strong focus on what individual developers need and consistently turning out excellent software.

behnamoh 4y ago
I still remember Borland’s logo and icons. Something about the 90s and 00s was special and maybe we didn’t appreciate it enough.
- browningstreet 4y ago
  Those Borland books, too. I lived with those Turbo Pascal books.
wenc 4y ago
Borland pivoted to enterprise long before this thing called Embarcadero. Recall it renamed itself Inprise before renaming itself back to Borland. Also Embarcadero isn’t Borland. They acquired Borland’s product lines but not Borland itself.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  And the original company seems, name change notwithstanding, to have stuck with the "Enterprise"-y mentality of Inprise.
bluedino 4y ago
I'm sure they made a great amount of money doing Turbo C/Pascal via mail order but that market is only so big. You need the $1,200 compiler suites to make the real cash.
nottorp 4y ago
JetBrains is subscription pricing now.

therealmarv 4y ago

I still have the feeling it's the most productive way to create beautiful native Windows desktop programs. Rapid application development is not an empty promise here. All my other endeavours with UI programming (Java/Swing, HTML/JS frontends, QT) felt way less productive. Maybe MS C# is the closest to Delphi nowadays.

yakubin 4y ago
I wonder if anyone here has experience with both Delphi and SwiftUI. I'd be curious to know which one is more comfortable.
- sarsway 4y ago
  Well there's a reason all the WYSIWYG UI editors died out. They are a quick way to whip up a passable UI, but usually turns out to be quite ugly under the hood, hard to reuse, and a pain to maintain. Delphi is really from a different age, simpler times, when the common paradigm was having the app directly connected to some sort of SQL database, which serves as a stable, static data source for the UI. Making glorified database editors is what it was really good at. These days.. things changed. UIs need to be flexible, reactive, reusable, adaptable. UIs that can handle uncertain states, asynchronous data flows, change dynamically and so on. SwiftUI / React / Flutter all ended up at the same paradigm, it's a much more advanced way of doing things. Also, high level languages are much more pleasant to work with.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Only by those that never bother to learn how to use layout managers.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    > They are a quick way to whip up a passable UI, but usually turns out to be quite ugly under the hood, hard to reuse, and a pain to maintain That's not my memory at all - even web-based traditional ASP apps made it relatively easy to use WYSIWYG form editors that modified the code as needed. But expectations around how dynamic UIs are supposed to be have changed. SPAs in particular are not very amenable to auto-code generation, but supposedly some options do exist (retool? Haven't tried it though).

giancarlostoro 4y ago

It does still exist, and I'd love to try it out, but I'm not throwing down thousands of dollars when it costs significantly less for me to get Visual Studio Pro as a single developer ($30 a month iirc) or you know... $120 for JetBrains IDE's annually (after 3 years) it makes no sense for me to throw down a thousand dollars (per year?) same with you Qt. I'm looking to evaluate your product and prototype and maybe build small projects that need a UI but your pricing scheme is not for people like me at all. One would likely argue that JetBrains probably isnt a RAD IDE, but Visual Studio definitely is fully capable of RAD editing capabilities, think WinForms.

marticode 4y ago
They have a free community edition for individuals.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  I tried it out and it wasn't exactly stable. Someone from Embarcadero that was mostly marketing reached out to me and I told them I had issues, they just tried to sell me a license instead of taking the time to get someone technical to talk to me. Not sure I want to buy a license from someone who doesn't invest more into ensuring their primary customer base gets the help they need. I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to build anything commercial under their free tier if I wanted to, so if I want to see if something would be worthwhile now I have to take a thousand dollar gamble as opposed to $30 a month with Visual Studio Pro, or even $120 with JetBrains. Update: Looks like JetBrains is $149 per year, and moving forward after October 2022 it will be $173 per year.

mhd 4y ago

...for the enterprise. Which is okay, there's plenty of mixed quality software for that sector. It's just that Delphi used to be a lot more oriented towards beginner to small-business developers. And note that this happened before the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs. If it was all about a reduced audience for desktop-based applications and then supporting that, I would understand it more. I haven't been following Delphi itself, but the parent company also manages ExtJS, which is aimed/priced similarly, yet with support/quality that doesn't justify this. Weird that outside of the BCPL or ML families, it's Ada that seems to be the one with the most momentum these days.

alyandon 4y ago
the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs Application development has gone backwards so much compared to the RAD tooling from the 90s. I really can't even properly describe it to the younger generation. :(
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  ah the GUI designers from Borland, light years ahead of everything else... it just worked and looked nice (compared to Microsoft shitshow that was Visual Studio back then), was very easy to learn and its the only thing in software I've seen in 20 years which deserved the title RAD.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    Delphi cut the corners with their fixed positioning. It will not work for web and it works very poorly for localization (labels change their lengths and can overlap over each other). As soon as you introduce layouts to your UI, all the Delphi simplicity goes out of the window. This is an interesting challenge to invent a way for UI to be pixel-fixed, yet work in web and with localization. If someone would do that, you could rebuild Delphi for web. I guess one way is to build a pixel-fixed form for English language and let AI to build a layout for this form.
    - 4y ago

minsight 4y ago

Embarcadero was acquired by the same jackasses that bought out a company where I used to work. The new owners had a bunch of attitude and kept crowing on about "their playbook". It turned out that the primary technology that they were buying us for was the one part of our product that we actually licensed from another vendor. I believe they spent millions and didn't get what they were looking for. They had an offshore team that theoretically could work with the codebase, but I don't remember seeing anything of consequence added to the product in the past 7-8 years. If I ever found that they bought out a company that used technology that I depended upon, I'd migrate to a new solution.

last_responder 4y ago
So in your opinion, this should be avoided? Looking to try something new ( old ) and this got me excited but your comment has soured it a bit for me.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  Yeah, if you want something like Delphi, try Lazarus instead which -for the most part- is basically an open source and cross platform Delphi clone[0], so you're not bound to the whims of a corporation that is often seen as where old proprietary software goes to die. [0] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/
- minsight 4y ago
  I wouldn't expect much in terms of value or growth from a platform owned by those clowns.
- gduke 4y ago
  Since Embarcacero was acquired in 2015 and until now, there has happened quite a bit to the RAD Studio IDE and underlying tech. I don't know about your situation, but, Delphi and C++Builder has not been left to rot.

cosmotic 4y ago

I remember one of the great things about delphi was that it statically linked everything into the single .exe making it totally self contained. A Windows GUI program could be a couple hundred KB, no other DLLs required. C/C++ could do the same but you were stuck with nasty raw win32 calls and a lower level language.

badsectoracula 4y ago
FWIW C++ Builder could do the same and had access to VCL too. AFAIK (never tried it) you could mix Delphi and C++ in the same project if you wanted.
- rndgermandude 4y ago
  yes, you could/can. The VCL itself was written in Delphi and seamlessly linked with C++Builder C++ (they had some language extensions to make it work)
- cosmotic 4y ago
  Over the years the minimum size of VCL apps increased. Last I checked (10 years ago maybe) it was like 1MB or more compared to 200KB or so in Delphi 3.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    Almost certainly is the extended RTTI information - VCL is huge after all and relies heavily on RTTI. The forms, objects, etc you are editing in the form designer are not just stand-ins like in, e.g. Glade, wxFormBuilder, QtDesigner or similar tools, they are live instances of the actual objects that are serialized on disk whenever you save the project with the serialized data becoming part of the program's resources and are deserialized when the program starts (VCL/Delphi calls this "object streaming"). This means that the full RTTI information needed to serialize and deserialize the objects (and any other object) needs to be part of the executable. At some point they extended the RTTI information so that you can also make dynamic calls to methods, obtain fields, etc so the RTTI data became larger. Lazarus adds a ton more data to the executables so where you'd get a 1MB in some recent Delphi, you'd probably get something like a 5MB executable with Lazarus (without debugging information - that'd make it much larger) on Windows. On Linux it can be even larger, e.g. the simple calculator shown here[0] (up left window) is ~2.88MB, stripped. [0] https://i.imgur.com/MkfN4pO.png https://i.imgur.com/MkfN4pO.png

omgmajk 4y ago

I have used Lazarus in the last year, it's very ugly but it gets the job done.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

You know a modern company is active when there’s a photo of a black lady with natural hair holding a laptop by a server room.

pipeline_peak 4y ago
Cont'd : Then you walk into the Delphi office and it's just a bunch of Nordic academic guys with grey hair.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  My hair is still dark; it's just the beard that's mostly grey nowadays. Signed, Sid Dabster

shimonabi 4y ago

I'm working with the Delphi libraries every day in C++ Builder, bucause my company bet on Turbo C++ and Builder in the 90s, when Microsoft technologies seemed primitive compared to it. At a recent meetup in my country, 90% of Delphi developers were over 60 years old. Also, Embarcadero licenses aren't cheap.

marcodiego 4y ago
Where do you live?
GnarfGnarf 4y ago
We also started with Borland C++ 3.1 in the 90s. The GUI IDE was mind-blowing at the time. It was superior to MS' Workbench. However, Borland really dropped the ball with C++ 4.5, and we had to switch to Visual Studio.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

marcodiego 4y 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.

api 4y ago
They should break off and commercialize just the cross-platform GUI and rapid development IDE for that and put a language like Go under it. Go with a good RAD IDE would be so amazing, like yank out my wallet and throw money at you while shaking amazing. Give me a good cross platform GUI. Give me a good IDE for it. Don't make me learn yet another fucking programming language that exists nowhere else to use it. The last part counts against this and also against Flutter, which forces you to learn Dart which is used nowhere but Flutter. What would have been wrong with Go or TypeScript? People already know those. Most successful languages are open source for very clear reasons, but a cross platform IDE is something that could very well justify being commercial. It's an absolute ton of work and a constant moving target to support. So far no pure open source effort has managed to succeed unless you count the various HTML-based GUI systems that are indirectly subsidized by Google and Apple.
- shrubble 4y ago

aaa_aaa 4y ago

AFAIK they signed a deal with education ministry of Turkey so that Delphi will be taught as the programming language in technical high schools.

pawelmurias 4y ago
Super evil
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > Super evil ...On the part of the Turkish Ministry of Education, which figured out that they'd get legions of young programmers all primed to jump ship to Free Pascal / Lazarus? Naah -- smart, but not exactly evil. :-)
- aaa_aaa 4y ago
  Not necessarily. I think Delphi with visual programming is ok for students. High school kids like immediate visual feedback and ease of use. Probably deal does not involve money.

marcodiego 4y ago

The linked page may be a snapashot of what delphi became: the video autoplays; controls disappear spontaneously with no obvious way to bring them back; most of the initial time in the video is spent showing the welcome screen: you can now set the background image and theme!; it has lots of text in the form of images, one of these says "Support for 4k+ Screens. Welcome to the future!"; the download button puts you in a page where you have to enter a lot of personal information and prove your are not a robot.

cowmix 4y ago

I remember going to a convention in 2005 for retail store software and I was amazed that Delphi dominated as the platform for POS systems.

LeonB 4y ago
I knew a pharmacist who wrote his own POS software in Delphi. It (and Visual Basic) had that position where they were so usable that even someone whose fulltime job was something else would be able to single handedly make a line of business app for that business.
- slt2021 4y ago
  it is amazing that you could just drop edit boxes and labels, hook up to data source and database and it will work without a single line of code written!

unixhero 4y ago

Both Embarcadero.com and Lazarus project homepage refers to that they have the capability of RAD. Lazarus - "RAD - Rapid Application Development." Embarcadero - "RAD Server - Reduces the complexities of rapidly building and deploying a multi-tier turn-key enterprise REST API application server with Swagger support." What does RAD refer to? What is it actually?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
andsoitis 4y ago
What is RAD? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development
badsectoracula 4y ago
> What does RAD refer to? Rapid Application Development :-P. Wikipedia has an article[0], but in general it can probably be thought as a precursor to agile (the article says that agile is a RAD method) in that instead of doing some lengthy pre/planing process you use an iterative approach that adapts to what the users want. In this particular case Lazarus is a RAD IDE in the sense that it allows quick development and iteration of functional GUIs - Delphi was also like that but at some point Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/Embarcadero/Whoever made it more of a name to use for their products ("RAD Studio") than something that describes them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development

panki27 4y ago

One of the best aspects of Delphi is how quickly you can whip together simple GUI applications. The main issue nowadays is finding helpful resources on the internet, as hardly anybody writes Delphi anymore. For the interested, a free Delphi IDE exists (comes with FreePascal compiler): https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

hengheng 4y ago
Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? Something that lets me draw a window with two number fields and a button that says "return sum", but it's two minutes of work and self-explanatory.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > Asking as someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? As the GP said, FP / Lazarus.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > As someone who last saw Delphi in computer class at school, what would be the modern equivalent? Maybe hard pressed to call it modern, but WinForms is still my go to for quickly making a UI, at least in Windows.
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    Same here. I've tried to pick up WPF but holy fatcats, what an explosion of XAML files in exchange for... pretty much nothing, really. It's a shame, really.
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      I would almost like XAML, if it wasn’t for styling. If it had some CSS like DSL, I’d use it more, but unfortunately overcrowding styles invokes nasty blobs of XML boilerplate often having to override stuff that doesn’t seem relevant to what you want to do.

bena 4y ago

Wow. It looks just like Visual Studio... 6. I have fond memories of Pascal, it's the language of the first programming class I took. But yeah. The website and the screenshots do not inspire confidence.

scrapcode 4y ago

I have fond memories of using Borland's Delphi when I was a much younger boy. GUI building tools such as Delphi, VS, JavaFX and the old Dreamweaver really helped certain concepts click for me at that age.

lord-squirrel 4y ago

Denmark's farming industry's ERP system run on a system called Ø90 which is written delphi, java and cobol. Still being actively maintained by IBM today.

nottorp 4y ago

It may exist but at that price tag only large companies with legacy applications will keep using it.

VikingCoder 4y ago

Delphi was great, until C# and WinForms came along. Then there was honestly no reason for me to use Delphi again. All the other UI junk in Visual Studio is terrible in comparison, for me.

pjmlp 4y ago
They still don't offer AOT compilation and low level coding as good as Delphi, even with the upcoming .NET 7 improvements. Native AOT will only support command line applications, and shared libraries. Pity that they decided to kill .NET Native.
innocentoldguy 4y ago
I continued using Delphi. I never liked C# or WinForms much. They felt too VB for me.

magicalhippo 4y ago

We use Delphi at work. We've gotten a lot of pressure from customers to move to the web. However the lack of ways to design non-trivial UIs quickly does not make it seen feasible at the moment. Then there's the fact that Win32 is like bedrock in terms of stability. We've got forms that's been designed and coded over 15 years ago which still works just as fine as they did back then. We've got input-heavy UIs, the one I'm working on right now is a single window with >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids. Getting the UI layout done and components connected to the DB will take me a day tops, it'll look great and based on history should work for the next 10+ years. The web seems like such a step back whenever I try it.

yrgulation 4y ago
“ >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids” Yeah i’ve built single page apps with more input fields than this and grid tables all in a single view. Are you sure this cant be easily done? Coincidentally that was first 15 years ago with extjs, second time with react 3 years ago - the latter being a slower process but still pretty much doable.
- liveoneggs 4y ago
  Does #1 still work?
  - yrgulation 4y ago
    It did until roughly 5 years ago. From what i found by googling the product was acquired by a larger competitor and then decommissioned in favour of an existing product. The benefit in web based uis is that they work on any platform a supporting browser can be installed. And if you understand js it can work for a very very long time.
- magicalhippo 4y ago
  > Are you sure this cant be easily done? No, I'm no web expert. We've not found a way so far, and I've not seen something like this on the web, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong. edit: to clarify, I don't doubt one can get 150 fields in a view on the web. But can one dev do it in one day and have it look great?

runjake 4y ago

Similarly, Windows Forms[1] still exists and is still being developed. Yeah, it was "deprecated" by Microsoft[2], but it's since been "un-deprecated". Windows Forms is C# and borrows heavily from Delphi's Rapid Application Development (RAD) style. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Forms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Forms 2. http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/WPF-QA http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/WPF-QA

kaba0 4y ago

Could someone please explain/describe how GUI creation was done with Delphi? I tried to look up a video/wiki page but I don’t see what kind of abstraction did it use and why was it as liked?

spapas82 4y ago
You can try the lazarus ide https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ since it is more or less an open source version of delphi. Tldr; it's a similar experience to vb6: drag n drop controls into a form, edit their properties and write code for their events...
unnouinceput 4y ago
You mean how you open Delphi IDE, create a new project (default is Windows VCL, but you can also do cross-platform FireMonkey just as easy), then when the main form is presented in IDE how you drop components from the components palette? As in same way you do it in Visual Studio when doing a WPF and or/ Winforms project as well? Or as in any visual IDE for any programming language, because they all follow the same idea?
- kaba0 4y ago
  I guess? I was interested in whether it had some unique feature/paradigm, or was it loved for some other reason.
  - CRConrad 4y ago
    > I was interested in whether it had some unique feature/paradigm, or was it loved for some other reason. It was so beloved because it actually worked exactly as the marketing slogan at the time claimed: "The power of C++ with the ease of Visual Basic". (Or was it the other way around?) This was a time when Microsoft's "Visual" Studio IDE was anything but: It had no visual form builder, just a code editor. To actually put something on screen, you had to write reams of code straight out of a Charles Petzold tome. Visual Basic, OTOH, sure did have a nice easy graphical UI builder, but a pathetically weak ultra-high-level language -- in contrast to Object Pascal, which is every bit as high- or as low-level as C++. I learned all three in an "Object Oriented Programming" course I took in 1995, IIRC in the order 1: OO concepts, 2: C++, 3: VB, 4: Delphi (or was it 2: VB, 3: C++?). After the two preceding, Delphi was a revelation and love at first sight. That love soured slightly after the Kylix debacle, some more with diverse bugginess and drawn-out implementation of Windows developments (Unicode, 64-bit, High-DPI...), and finally petered out almost totally over the covert "feature moved to higher-priced more Enterprise-y edition" and overt price hikes over the years (decades) since, with the on-again off-again free (gratis) Community Edition shenanigans as perhaps the final nail in the coffin. But Delphi versions 1 through 7 (1995 -- ca 2005-10) still has, and probably will for ever have, a special place in my heart as my most beloved programming tool. And fortunately, it has a worthy heir in Free Pascal / Lazarus. HTH!

29athrowaway 4y ago

If you want Delphi to succeed you have to win the developers. The Embarcadero website experience for a developer is nonsense. The first thing you see in the page is "BUY NOW", "FREE TRIAL". It's so aggressive that my instant reaction is to close the product page before I even get to see what the product is about. And no, I don't want a "product demo". I don't want to contact sales. I am a developer I don't care about that. "Contact sales"/"Request a product demo" sounds intimidating. It sounds like you want me to spend $5000, which I am not willing to spend. My primary objective as a developer is to develop applications. The website has to focus on assisting that process.

archielc 4y ago

I used Borland Delphi (as well as C++ Builder for some period) throughout my university times for all kinds of home works and hobby apps. It was extremely easy to build simple but still good-looking UIs. At some point I even had a small reusable library for graph problems (add/edit nodes/edges with nice arrows/labels etc.) What I really liked was how fast you could get to real coding part with minimum boilerplate. Happy to see Lazarus IDE still having a strong community.

Double_a_92 4y ago

If only debugging worked properly, especially in 64bit applications...

_8j50 4y ago

For the unaware delphi packers are somewhat popular with malware authors.

jamier1978 4y ago

A significant amount of Delphi code I wrote 20+ years ago is still in the wild and still making a ton of money for a company I used to work for. I actually miss the days of Windows desktop development. Good Times.

chinabot 4y ago
All my future developments will be in Lazarus but I have one mega-client with a big Delphi production program I have to keep happy for the foreseeable future or until their large team of developers and advisors can decide which language/platform/infrastructure etc they want to redevelop it in. 3+ years of consultants and meetings but not one line of code so far :-)
- CRConrad 4y ago
  Put in a bid to port it to FP/Lazarus? (Oh, you already did that? ;-)

elzbardico 4y ago

Borland was just another example of Death-By-MBA.

Kaibeezy 4y ago

Editorialized title. It really does detract from the discussion. Let us reach our own judgments. Or am I missing something?

hankman86 4y ago

I still have a warm spot in my heart for Delphi. When I bought a license for Delphi 1.0 running on Windows 3.1, it was like a revelation to me. Having previously used Borland Pascal on DOS, I found it unbelievable how easy developing Windows UIs can be. I developed a 16-bit business app (accounting, inventory management, customer records) on Delphi 1.0 which is still running today (you need a 32 bit version of Windows 7 though). The bundled Borland Database Engine (Paradox desktop) was decent enough for structured data management in a single-user application. The best feature was the compiler that sprinted through my source code, turning it into a statically linked executable in mere seconds (on a Pentium 60). While I have long moved on from Pascal, many great ideas of Delphi live on in C# and Typescript.

RachelF 4y ago
Except the small statically linked executable. C# needs .NET which has its very own circle of dll hell with compatibility and confusion version numbers for your users.

kokizzu2 4y ago

US$ 1,599 XD not using windows, delphi, c++ anymore so, no..

unpeasant 4y ago

Went for a job interview last year and the tech stack was an API built in Delphi, on Macs, using a virtual machine running Windows. Company was doing well from it, but trying to scale, and finding anyone to code delphi was impossible.

CRConrad 4y ago
Throw me a link or a mail, gotta see if they're still looking.
jamier1978 4y ago
As someone who worked with Delphi for many years I've often wondered if there is a lot of money to be made by charging companies to work on these codebases. As much as I liked Delphi back in the day, low job satisfaction puts me off looking in to the idea.

LorenPechtel 4y ago

So what if it does? In the old days I loved them. Then I found myself using older versions despite having newer ones because of important bugs. Then came 64 bit code. They were years late in releasing a compiler that could produce 64 bit code and the reaction from the company seemed to be that it's a tiny portion of the users that need it. Never mind that for that not-so-tiny portion (you might have no direct need of 64 bit address space but if you have to play nice with 64 bit code you have to be 64 bit--plugins) it was a total showstopper, companies relying on it were dead in the water, had to to a total rewrite or die. I got the strong feeling that they were looking at us customers as a resource to be milked, not supported. My employer at the time died in the housing collapse, while I still have a couple of little Delphi apps around that I wrote I haven't touched it since then. C# was almost as good (and at this point all that's missing are arrays with an enum index and arrays that don't start at zero) and has much better support.