Delphi or FreePascal?

[Robert Kosek]

Hey Chebmaster, how about you stop sowing the seeds of a flamewar, and get back on topic?


Turbo Delphi, as an IDE, was based on .NET, yes. However, not a single application coming from Turbo Delphi uses it unless you use the .NET enabled version. I hate .NET just as much as you, and for some pretty good reasons/bad experiences.

But see, Delphi has one upped Freepascal in two areas:
1) User Friendliness
2) Ease of Use

It took me some 10 tries to add a search path to the library so I could include an external source package. Yeah, it finally worked, but by the time I was done I wanted to kick it. I still don't know how to enable a conditional compile, possibly with multiple conditions.

In Dephi? Forget it, I was done the first try. No hassle, no mess, no need to fiddle around in the user manual and try to figure the whole dumb thing out.


Unless it is for console/non-visual applications FPC sits in my software "closet". I use Delphi for everything else.

And as to OSes ... if MS built their next OS off Unix it would take more effort for backwards compatibility and to enable software development upon the new platform with their own tools. I don't like Vista either, but you don't have to be so damned snappy about it and hijack the thread!

[dmantione]

In the next years, there will be a large presence of both Windows, Linux and Mac. I don't expect Windows will disappear, at least not in the next 10 to 15 years. There will be three markets. It might or might not make sense to port applications, after all Linux is a very different market than Windows (but billions of euros go round now already). Still, ignoring the Linux and Mac markets becomes increasingly foolish, IMO.

FPC simply provides you a tool to target these 3 main markets, and others.

[Chebmaster]

However, not a single application coming from Turbo Delphi uses it unless you use the .NET enabled version.

Umm... I said exactly that in my post. Unlike the Delphi itself, the programs you create with it run in Linux without any problems (well, unless you use some obscure WinAPI function).

It took me some 10 tries to add a search path to the library so I could include an external source package. Yeah, it finally worked, but by the time I was done I wanted to kick it.

:x Well, there are some... ahem... downsides... But when you get used to use build scripts where you state the paths explicitly, and become a Pascal guru in general (just a few years of sweat) such matters stop being a concern.

In my experience, Free Pascal is nice and more modern dialect, while Delphi (I used to use Turbo Explorer) seems a bit archaic with its lack of certain things like macros, QWORD type, Exit(<result>) operator, inability to perform pointer math (you need to cast types manually a lot) and plethora of other things -- mostly not critical but annoying.
Plus, soon FPC will have generics, leaving Delphi well behind.

I still don't know how to enable a conditional compile, possibly with multiple conditions.

Huh?.. Didn't -d<xxx> / {$ifdef <xxx>} work?

I don't like Vista either,

You see? You see?

but you don't have to be so damned snappy about it

But who to hate then? Cold War is over, Saddam is dead... M$ is such a convenient scapegoat you can throw rotten things at. But you're right. This is no place for such things.

1) User Friendliness
2) Ease of Use

Well... When your first experience is Turbo Pascal + MS-DOS, one somehow considers as "user friendliness" such things as ability to run your program parallelly to IDE, without the need to close it, and without the need to reboot after each raised exception.
I abandoned Delphi for FPC years ago, when it still was 1.1, and I got well used to the lack of debugger (never managed to make one work with Free Pascal) And rely to the extended logging and debug writes. These do nicely.

Plus, Lazarus is definitely more stable than Delphi, which often has strange bugs and needs to be restarted.
On the other hand, Delphi (in my experience) generates a bit faster code.

[wodzu]

Sorry to disappoint you, but they *did* care. Problem is, they lost the touch with their "customers" needs and tried to enforce their own views of what is best. Just like M$ today.

Ehm like Stalin perhaps? Who killed 7 million people on Ukraine because of starvation and 1.8 milion people by forcing them to work?

They *think* they care, but in fact they live so isolated lives at their campus that they lost the ties to the real life. They just don't comprehend how one could *not* have 3Gb RAM and a broadband Internet.

I think they are pretty aware of that. It is all about money. I was thinking more about customer support. personaly I don't see any reason for switching to a never system (from Xp to Vista for me) if everything is working perfectly fine. No switch - no need to buy a new hardware

Even the Windows XP (2001) which is used today on most of the machines needs *twice* as much resources to run the same tasks smoothly than the much newer Linuxes (2005-2006) do.

I am not Linux expert however when I run Fedora Core 3 I couldn't see any difference in running speed.

But Vista is reported to be much, much worse. The gargantuan system requirements and DRM complexities will sink this Titanic sooner or later - see the harrowing stories at http://badvista.fsf.org/ . Many customers prefer to stick to the old good XP, others get fed with ms and move to Ubuntu.

Yeah, but is there any reason for switching to Vista?

So, in this perspective FPC is the best.

Depends what do you want to do. Maybe I am strange but I love Delphi's IDE and I love Delphi's Debugger Of course when it comes to crossplatforming FPC is a must, but still firstly I would develop my application in Delphi and then port it to FPC.

[Chebmaster]

****

PM'd. :evil:

I am not Linux expert however when I run Fedora Core 3 I couldn't see any difference in running speed.

This difference is subtle sometimes, but it bites.
I experienced Fedora Core 6 and Win XP on the same machine with 512 Mb RAM.

While you run only browser/office, everything is fine. But when you start to add up (DC++/antivirus/firewall/Lazarus/mail client/file manager/some game/et cetera) and yor program take 600..700 megabytes of memory (while you have, as I said, 512), XP starts to swap. When you start copying or otherwise accessing big files, XP slows down to a crawl, swapping the applications out of memory, and 80% of your time you just wait when it stop swapping and react to your command.

When you boot FC6 and start to use the same set of applications (minus the antivirus, which you don't need and the firewall, which is built-in and lightweight) the difference is glaring. Not just noticeable but glaring. Because Fedora swaps *only* when you switch from one app to another one. While XP swaps all the time, without stopping, at each your action, and it never ends.

The only explanation I can think of is that XP uses terminally ineffective swapping algorithms while Fedora employs just the right ones. Indeed, the M$ developers never saw the swapping in effect, since they work on the top-grade machines, and didn't bother to test how it works.

Add here the fact that XP freezes or BSODs each few days while Fedora works for weeks and months without any problems (and even survives the hardware failures in the IDE interface, just restarting it)... In short, I abandoned Windows for Fedora.

It is all about money.

Exactly. Why should I buy another 512Mb RAM that I don't need?

Yeah, but is there any reason for switching to Vista?

There is not a single one!
So, Vista is useless for most of the people. And that's the same thing that downed 3dfx. The extremely long production cycles.

and I love Delphi's Debugger

(sigh) I loved it too... But $1300 is a very good deterrent, it does wonders to one's adaptivity. Plus, the debugger isn't very useful when you debug a fullscreen OpenGL game.
And now it's totally useless for me, since I use a schema where all my critical code resides in a dll handled by a different program.

[czar]

Still what it boils down to is that you are not likely to get a job programming in FPC. So if you want to program in pascal for a living then learning to use delphi is the way to go.

FPC will stay a hobbiest compiler.

BTW it is quite easy to debug DLLs. And as for debugging fullscreen app, just run it in a non-fullscreen mode.

[dmantione]

Plus, the debugger isn't very useful when you debug a fullscreen OpenGL game.

Note that gdb will happily attach to a fullscreen OpenGL game. Just switch to the Linux console, type "gdb /path/to/your/game pid" and happy debugging. You have to get used to gdb, certainly (I still don't like it), but you can debug.

[Chebmaster]

So if you want to program in pascal for a living then learning to use delphi is the way to go.

Indeed.

But I somehow don't see a great commercial applicability in Delphi game development, the prejudice is too high. Am I wrong?

The hardcore GPL-d projects, on the other hand... :roll:

[czar]

True, Delphi is not used in many commercial games. However, the company I work for has been developing Delphi software including games (incl, DirectX 9 3d software) and other multimedia software for over ten years now. And I am certain there are other companies doing similar projects that use skills related to games development.

[Setharian]

Add here the fact that XP freezes or BSODs each few days while Fedora works for weeks and months without any problems (and even survives the hardware failures in the IDE interface, just restarting it)... In short, I abandoned Windows for Fedora.

I have my Windows XP system running for 4 years non-stop.... the system itself takes 50 MB of physical memory on startup, running quite a lot of background services so I guess it isn't as bad as you say....using it every day at least 7 hours a day (more when playing games)...so only positive experience with Windows XP from my side....

personally *nixes should be used as servers, they excel at that, I see no reason why are some projects for *nix systems trying to clone Windows' GUI, instead they should think of a completely different approach and apply that one if they really want to provide a different experience than windows, now it's just clone of windows' GUI with a lot more problems to set it up (the whole system, not the GUI )....

as a "sidenote" we're no longer talking about the topic, are we?