The 100% discount is still available!
Delphi 10.1 Berlin starter edition at 0$
The 100% discount is still available!
Delphi 10.1 Berlin starter edition at 0$
Last edited by salvadordf; 31-01-2017 at 08:26 AM. Reason: propper delphi edition
A simple test...
Free? that's still too expensive - You'd literally have to pay me to use Delphi over Lazarus - which I am actually open to, a man's got to eat
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.
I'm a Delphi supporter now for 6 years already. But even I must admit that I'm becoming more and more disappointed with it.
Now it is nice that Delphi ships with a bunch of components that provide all those neat almost ready to use features.
But what I don't like is that extending any of these components has become a nightmare in recent Delphi versions. Why? Because Delphi VCL (and especially FireMonkey) heavily and I mean HEAVILY depends on use of interfaces which means code damn hard to read.
I still remember times when I started programming in Delphi 6 and even thou at the time my programming knowledge was much lower than it is now I never had much of a problem for making of a customized version of certain VCL component. But now even thou my programming knowledge is greatly improved I'm having huge difficulties extending existing modern Delphi VCL components.
In fact the last time when I was trying to make a customized version of some VCL component I actually rage-quitted after spending a whole day getting nowhere. The next day I fired up my old laptop with Delphi 7 on it, copied the code of that VCL component I was extending to my desktop current development machine and extended that component with desired features. And for all that I spent just over two hours. Sure that extended component does not support component styling and it probably won't work OK with advanced reference counting. But since I'm not using none of these features in my project I'm fine with that.
Another frustrating thing about Delphi is that it contains quite many very old bugs. And while many of them might seem trivial at first look they could actually have huge impact. One such bug is related to code folding or to be more precise scenarios where parts of your keeps getting expanded so you end up either spending most of your time folding back that code or not using of the code folding feature at all which is a shame as if used correctly it can greatly improve code writing productivity.
Any way for the time being I'm still sticking with Delphi but if this trend will continue then I'm definitely going to switch to Lazarus or some other IDE. I guess that one of the main reason why I'm sticking with Delphi is that it has more powerful debugger. At least it seemed so when I was doing comparison against Lazarus debugger about a year ago. Hasn't checked the newest version of Lazarus. Has it been improved on this area recently?
The debugging support of FPC+Lazarus nowadays is just as good as anything in the GNU tool-chain style compilers for example. I don't have a single issue debugging my code and I can't think of anything about debugging in Delphi that is better or that I can do without. Debugging works fine on Windows, Linux and OSX - although OSX Lazarus is a bit quirky but that's mainly down to jumping through X-code hoops.
Delphi is all about the components it ships with which are generally of a very high quality.
However I personally think Firemonkey is a joke - given they're a large commercial company they should be capable of far more than I am - yet my own comparative system is so much better it's funny - it doesn't give me much confidence in the abilities of their developers if a group of people being paid good wages are incapable of producing a better system than one person working in their spare time.
Their abysmal cross platform support over the years is nothing short of embarrassing nowadays - again they pay their developers an actual wage - why can't they do what Lazarus has been doing for years? who the hell is coding for them? the aliens from independence day?
Not to mention they expect you to pay extra for the 'privilege' of cross platform development, I mean *seriously*?
Unless you're being forced to support some old Delphi code base - updating it because it would be too expensive to re-implement - Delphi is dead - only somebody without another economically viable choice would *pay* for what is free everywhere else.
I miss Borland - they actually cared about their product and their customers - not just the money they could squeeze out of them.
I say this as somebody that has been coding in object pascal for over 25 years - I'm an expert and as much of an authority in the language as anybody can be - FPC + Lazarus are the better choice. I don't see why anybody in a position to choose would choose anything else.
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.
For me the best part about Delphi is FiremonkeyRecently I had this idea to redo my bot making software in Lazarus and guess what, control's size can't be scaled which pretty much is a road block for my zoom in/out idea.
Maybe I'm spoiled by Unity and UE4 but I got used to creating UI that can fit the screen, be able to rotate or scale the control If I wan to. Make new components by simply nesting and stitching together simpler ones.
Embarcadero does what it can to keep Delphi an unattractive choice but at least they understand that modern IDE for application development should be able to produce modern looking GUI.
it works, it's pretty and it's robust - firemonkey is certainly a great off the shelf choice for people looking to easily develop unique looking apps but lack any sort of technical knowledge or need of hardware accelerated APIs.
But that's the kicker - we're game developers - if you're talking 3D acceleration, games you're also talking performance, cross platform flexibility - firemonkey simply isn't designed to work inside an existing engine/framework - it's designed to *be* the framework. It uses a ton of memory (I assume it has to be creating back-buffers for every control to use as much as it does) , it doesn't give you full control over GL initialisation (very important) or the 'render loop'.
If you're not using the 3D hardware outside of what firemonkey directly gives you - and you can afford it, then sure, brilliant, firemonkey is pretty and it works.
But it's not very suitable as the GUI for a 3D game for example - that needs total control and utilisation of the hardware - this doesn't include every project - not at all - but it becomes an issue eventually so unless you're absolutely certain your project won't grow? it's worth thinking about.
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.
Just installed Delphi Starter for the first time. That limited commercial use license is pretty worthless:
"Once your company's total revenue reaches US $1,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, move up to the Professional edition with an unrestricted commercial license."
So that is your TOTAL revenue, not just revenue from Delphi Starter (as I assumed at first). I'd think that a company that isn't able to make $1000 in a year is probably in trouble, at least in western countries.
And meanwhile you can get the complete Visual Studio 2017 Community for free if you make less than a million dollars.
BTW, those samples are boring. Back in the days of Borland, even the samples had gems. I remember using the TVEDIT demo as my default text editor for years after buying TP6.
Agree with Wiering that the starter licence is not very attractive but better than nothing I guess. Anyway I just successfully downloaded the Tokyo 10.2 starter version. Let's see if it can be useful.
HiOriginally Posted by Jonax
Do you know if the Tokyo version have any advantages for gamedev users?
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