Delphi XE2 is here!

[deathshadow]

I think Delphi XE 2 Professional is worth the price considering that it supports 3 platforms. Just think of Flash CS5 that costs $700 and 3D Studio Max that costs $3500.

... and FPC/Lazarus which costs nothing... much less GCC, GAS...

I think what makes it seem so ludicrous is the price disparity between starter and pro --- 425% price increase off of a $200 base just to go cross platform and toss in the command line version of the compiler? BULL!

[phibermon]

Oh well that's that then. Starter not listing OSX/IOS as targets? that's the death bell for it being used for games development. Only companies are going to be able to afford the higher editions (and they wouldn't purchase for games, can't get the staff, C better commercial choice etc) and there can only be a handful of hobbiests that can afford the pro edition.

They should adopt a different licencing strategy, perhaps one version of Delphi that does everything but the different licences restrict your volume of sales/projects etc similar to the way FMOD does it.

Anyway, it's a good thing for OOP that Delphi XE2 exists and if you can afford Pro then enjoy your cross-platform development!

Everybody else? join us in FPC land

[LP]

I think what makes it seem so ludicrous is the price disparity between starter and pro --- 425% price increase off of a $200 base just to go cross platform and toss in the command line version of the compiler? BULL!

Yes, Starter Edition is rip-off.

It does not mean FPC/Lazarus is the solution as in my own case I found moving to FPC/Lazarus very difficult because of several issues related to IDE functionality and the compilation process really eats up your time. Metaphorically speaking, when I move from Delphi XE 2 Beta IDE to Lazarus, it feels like I'm using Notepad.

[AirPas]

i like XE2 , except one thing , the exe size ( empty VCL form = 4mb ) ( empty firemonkey form = 8mb )

[VilleK]

That's debug build. Empty vcl-form in release mode is 1,5 mb. So it's not so bad

[phibermon]

It does not mean FPC/Lazarus is the solution as in my own case I found moving to FPC/Lazarus very difficult because of several issues related to IDE functionality and the compilation process really eats up your time. Metaphorically speaking, when I move from Delphi XE 2 Beta IDE to Lazarus, it feels like I'm using Notepad.

Nobody said Lazarus was perfect If you've got the money then I wish you many happy coding sessions in Delphi XE2.

But I personally don't have any issues using FPC+Lazarus. It's an advanced cross platform solution that certainly doesn't feel like 'Notepad' when compared to commercial IDEs.

I've written and/or debugged complex systems, 3D Engines, Virtual Machines, Emulators and compilers. It provides me with all the tools I want and more importantly it supports all the platforms and architechtures I want to use.

For free? you can't argue that it's not good value for money

But Delphi? Nearly a thousand dollars to support a fraction of the platforms? umm, not for me.

I'm not against purchasing Delphi but I'll wait until they add native support in their compiler for ARM and PowerPC; add RTLs for Linux, Haiku; add support for JVM and LLVM etc etc etc

Delphi is a commercial quality product, it's synomynous with Visual Studio in it's quality and target Audience and it has commerical quality support for IOS which is a big thing that lots of people want. It's geared towards databases and money making, and all of that is needed and it's great for the OOP language.

FreePascal is more like GCC, it's an Open, vastly cross platform toolchain. It's for people that want to use their language of choice on all platforms, Linux, embedded systems etc

In my opinion, pretty much all the reasons someone would choose GCC over Visual Studio are the same reasons someone would choose FPC over Delphi.

Yes if I had the money I'd buy delphi, of course I would. But only if it produced faster code than FPC on it's target systems, which is quite likely does. at the moment.

FPC however is gearing up to support LLVM and unless Delphi supports it too then it'll never out-perform FPC because really it'll be trying to out-perform LLVM and if you don't know what that is, look it up and know that I'm right.

As stated in a previous post, embarcado should drop their native compiler, use FPC and focus on their IDE and libs. Plenty of big companies work on Linux, Apache, GCC etc for reasons that make sound commercial sence. I don't see how this is any different, FPC is without question going to dominate. It's probably got ten times the number of developers and they all work for free...

[LP]

But I personally don't have any issues using FPC+Lazarus. It's an advanced cross platform solution that certainly doesn't feel like 'Notepad' when compared to commercial IDEs.

Mouse scrolling doesn't work in IDE and you can't change this behavior. The code editor is unpredictable when setting tab/spaces to 1. Refactoring limited to the unit and not entire project. These are some issues I'm having, among others.

I've written and/or debugged complex systems, 3D Engines, Virtual Machines, Emulators and compilers. It provides me with all the tools I want and more importantly it supports all the platforms and architechtures I want to use.

Really? The debugger never worked for me. On stock installation, empty new project it always crashes, both on Vista and Win7, on 32-bit and 64-bit. On every machine I've tried. In the latest builds, it allows you to step 1-3 lines before crashing again. It's hard to believe you could actually use it to debug some complex project.

As stated in a previous post, embarcado should drop their native compiler, use FPC and focus on their IDE and libs.

I agree. There is not much innovation going on with Delphi's compiler when compared to FreePascal, which supported 64-bit and Mac OS since long time ago. I would actually like to see Delphi's integration with FPC even on Windows platform.

[WILL]

I have to admit that I'm rather disappointed in Embarcadero on their OS X/iOS/64-bit removal decision for Starter XE2. Mainly because they worked so hard to get us indies all riled and excited about Delphi again with a more cost effective edition then they they 'pull our pants off' by not including the new platforms in it's next major version.

Who else wants to get on the Mac or the iPad more then game developers? And what other denomination of indie developers makes games? So this was a little backhanded in my own personal opinion.

[phibermon]

@Lifepower - Thank you very much for debating my points and you're quite right there are parts of the IDE that need some polish although I am suprised to hear you've experienced crashes during debugging, If you'll take my word for it I've not had an issue stepping through many lines of code and not experienced the behaviour you described.

If you've tried multiple builds and still experience that issue I just don't know what to say. Obviously you'd notice if your system was unstable in other ways. There's the outside possiblity that some memory masking rootkit/virus plauges some common link between your platforms or perhaps there's some bizzare in memory conflict with your antivirus or some other such thing, softice etc.

I must insist that you can debug without issue, perhaps someone else would be kind enough to validate.

---

I agree. There is not much innovation going on with Delphi's compiler when compared to FreePascal, which supported 64-bit and Mac OS since long time ago. I would actually like to see Delphi's integration with FPC even on Windows platform.

Even if it wasn't a complete replacement, it would be very nice to see support for switching between compilers although I suspect that they store very different forms of debug information in builds which may very well require quite a lot of work to intergrate into the Delphi environment (breakpoints, watches, decode views etc) although I might be wrong and they use somthing close to GDB.