It's always those tool glitches that really hurt development huh? :/
I am curious though, what kind of numbers do you get for downloads of the latest versions of Asphyre? Are you able to track just how popular a specific version is or how many are downloading it?
Jason McMillen
Pascal Game Development
Co-Founder
You can track downloads in google code, i will let you search itOriginally Posted by WILL
Same doesn't seem to apply for SVN downloads. However cool thing is ability to track exact code line changes per each revision.
According to statistics, in previous month, there were around 1276 downloads of Asphyre Sphinx 2. There were some downloads for earlier versions as well, but considerably less. All these downloads, along with forums, used roughly 20 Gb of hosting bandwidth. This usage pattern has been similar since last November. For instance, in March, Asphyre Sphinx 2 got 1289 downloads.
I guess this number of downloads is not much, considering that above numbers might not be unique users and some people might even download the library several times or even different archive types (e.g. zip, rar). However, there was a demise of Delphi/Pascal users since few years back and only since last year there was some increase due to release of Delphi XE 2 with 64-bit and Mac OS support.
The trend for Pascal seems to have reversed in 2009-2010 (with D2009 being the first version "usable" since D7?), but this wasn't really noticeable until end of 2011.
(ohloh does real-world activity stats on open-source projects, it's a better trend indicator IME than TIOBE f.i.)
https://www.ohloh.net/languages/comp...s&percent=true
That said, if the commits went up, the stats for new lines of code added didn't went up in the same fashion, indicating that the activity is probably centered around bug fixing and porting the code to the new compilers/platforms. So not exactly a revival, but better than letting the code rot away!
PS: I registered your Google Code SVN in ohloh, its commits & code will now contribute to the Pascal popularity statistics ;-)
Although commits could indirectly imply the popularity of Pascal, I don't think it's an accurate measure as they are many more closed-source projects that are not being monitored.
This kind of proves my above point. Delphi 2006-2007 was a huge jump since Delphi 7 both in language and IDE features. Delphi 2009, 2010 and XE weren't really big improvements, besides compatibility annoyance of forceful introduction of Unicode. Open-source trend in 2009 could be mostly due to delayed reaction to free versions of Turbo Delphi and growing community of FPC/Lazarus.
Yes, but activity on those closed-source projects is unlikely to exhibit trends completely opposite to those of open source on the same language, while TIOBE f.i. can be fooled by synonyms (a rise in "Delphi" fro TIOBE could actually be attributed to problems at the automobile parts manufacturer).
Yeah, but they were dire in terms of usability, not as dire as D2005, but dire still, and those new features just weren't stable enough until D2009 (and even then, generics in D2009 are problematic, both at the compiler and RTL levels). The stability of the IDE was also not quite there.
Lazarus is certainly showing activity, and the top individual committers revolve around Lazarus or FPC, though Lazarus itself is by far the largest FPC/Lazarus project, and it shows different peaks, f.i. https://www.ohloh.net/p/lazarusOpen-source trend in 2009 could be mostly due to delayed reaction to free versions of Turbo Delphi and growing community of FPC/Lazarus.
As for real trendy languages, the winners are obviously Python & JavaScript, all the others seem to be either stable (like Java or PHP) or losing ground (C, C++, C#, Ruby...), just to place things in perspective.
I'm not sure how relevant it is to talk about the popularity of pascal in relation to other languages. If it's in terms of an open source project and attracting the largest number of users/devs as possible, then why choose Pascal anyway?
Given that the use of other languages such as Java effectively eclipses Pascal (pun intended) the only justifications I can currently think of are :
* Because you love the language
* Because of a large existing code-base that would be uneconomical to port to another language (including the use of specialized third party pascal code)
* Because you intend to write something big and believe the strong typing of Pascal will reduce your bugs in the long term.
--
That said I'm delighted that Pascal use is going up again!
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie - that's an extinction level impact event.
If you talk about Asphyre (remember, it's Asphyre thread), then the decision choosing Pascal (Delphi) was made almost 12 years ago.
If you meant why keeping the project written in Pascal? Because it is too large to be ported to other languages, which would involve enormous effort and there might be better alternatives already. For instance, if you would use C#, then XNA would be a place to start. Besides, with 64-bit platform provided by Delphi and FPC/Lazarus, Mac OS and iOS, there is no reason why would you have the need to switch to a different language/tool.
Asphyre itself, which was initially called PowerDraw, was started based on motivation from experience with DelphiX. First, it was a plugin for DelphiX to provide hardware acceleration for alpha-blending and rotation effects, but as DelphiX started to age with its outdated DirectX 7 support, Asphyre (PowerDraw) was rewritten to be a standalone package using DirectX 8 back in 2001. Indeed, the peak period of highest activity in Asphyre community are 2007 - 2009 years; you can see this by the number of posts around these times in our previous community forums.
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