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> On the other hand, the ecosystem is great. Hard disagree. I worked with Pascal for about 10 years, and the lack of modern libraries was a source of frequent

by Svip 3y ago

> On the other hand, the ecosystem is great. Hard disagree. I worked with Pascal for about 10 years, and the lack of modern libraries was a source of frequent frustration, meaning we often had to develop the solutions ourselves, or abandon an idea entirely.

pjmlp 3y ago
In regards to Delphi there were plenty of them, sold by companies specialised in component libraries. Naturally one had to be willing to pay for them.
kmoser 3y ago
Yep. Unless it's part of a legacy project, or I'm developing something as a fun experiment, I have no interest in languages that lack modern, robust, stable, up-to-date libraries.
- musicale 3y ago
  > I have no interest in languages that lack modern, robust, stable, up-to-date libraries. I guess JavaScript is out then. ;-)
nine_k 3y ago
May we please have a few examples of what's missing?
- Svip 3y ago
  The situation may obviously have changed today, it's been a few years since I last worked with Pascal. Back around 2016, we were looking for a different way of communicating between our services (you could kind of see them as micro-services, but I would not describe them as "micro"), which until then had relied on our own communication implementation on top of Windows socket. Our implementation was OK, but could not communicate beyond a single Windows machine, and it definitely did not allow multiple instances of the same services. We wanted to scale up, so we started looking into new technologies. Our lead developer was interested in building a RabbitMQ prototype. There were two libraries around to find, but none of them were finished, so we spent a lot of time finishing one of those implementations. We also looked into ProtoBuf, but that was a steeper hill to climb. When I left in early 2019, we were still using the old WinSock communication, though I understand from former co-workers, that they've switch to an UDP-based system instead now. That's the most vivid one I can remember, because we pushed on, despite the available libraries being weak. I also remember trying MongoDB, which required a lot of polishing the available libraries as well. Other ideas I remember pursuing briefly, until I recognised finished some of the libraries would be too tall an order. For the record, I don't have a problem with Pascal in general, nor its community. But considering how trivial it is to find a solid robust library for modern technologies (even if kind of fads) for other popular languages, compared to Pascal, it definitely feels weird to call its ecosystem "great". Of course, the libraries I've mentioned may be great today. But RabbitMQ and MongoDB are also a bit older technologies today.

by Svip 3y ago

pjmlp 3y ago

In regards to Delphi there were plenty of them, sold by companies specialised in component libraries. Naturally one had to be willing to pay for them.

kmoser 3y ago

Yep. Unless it's part of a legacy project, or I'm developing something as a fun experiment, I have no interest in languages that lack modern, robust, stable, up-to-date libraries.

musicale 3y ago
> I have no interest in languages that lack modern, robust, stable, up-to-date libraries. I guess JavaScript is out then. ;-)

nine_k 3y ago

May we please have a few examples of what's missing?

Svip 3y ago
The situation may obviously have changed today, it's been a few years since I last worked with Pascal. Back around 2016, we were looking for a different way of communicating between our services (you could kind of see them as micro-services, but I would not describe them as "micro"), which until then had relied on our own communication implementation on top of Windows socket. Our implementation was OK, but could not communicate beyond a single Windows machine, and it definitely did not allow multiple instances of the same services. We wanted to scale up, so we started looking into new technologies. Our lead developer was interested in building a RabbitMQ prototype. There were two libraries around to find, but none of them were finished, so we spent a lot of time finishing one of those implementations. We also looked into ProtoBuf, but that was a steeper hill to climb. When I left in early 2019, we were still using the old WinSock communication, though I understand from former co-workers, that they've switch to an UDP-based system instead now. That's the most vivid one I can remember, because we pushed on, despite the available libraries being weak. I also remember trying MongoDB, which required a lot of polishing the available libraries as well. Other ideas I remember pursuing briefly, until I recognised finished some of the libraries would be too tall an order. For the record, I don't have a problem with Pascal in general, nor its community. But considering how trivial it is to find a solid robust library for modern technologies (even if kind of fads) for other popular languages, compared to Pascal, it definitely feels weird to call its ecosystem "great". Of course, the libraries I've mentioned may be great today. But RabbitMQ and MongoDB are also a bit older technologies today.