Delphi XE2 is here!

[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...