Will Delphi die?

**Robert Kosek** · 01-01-2005, 06:04 PM

You appear to forget that Lazarus is an OpenSource revolution. You can't pave a road without first laying a foundation. Lazarus needs lots of help, and "cleaning" up. Give it time, and it'll be way better than Delphi.

The only reason I'm sticking to Delphi at this point is my familiarity with it. I didn't want to figure out Lazarus and OpenGL simultaneously.

**jasonf** · 03-01-2005, 01:14 AM

I love Delphi, have done for years. It's a very nice language. It also taught me a thing or two about coding properly (If I was to be perfectly honest), the lessons I learned from Delphi have been put to good use in my VB.net work in the office and I've been able to help other less fortunate coders in their work too.

I agree that if Delphi Dies, it will be Borland's fault. Their standards have slipped immensely and they havn't innovated enough so they find themselves in a trench dug by Microsoft.

Delphi5 was a brilliant piece of work. I wrote some cool stuff with that and DelphiX. Had a great time doing it too. The IDE was pretty close to perfect for the job at hand. When the JEDI-SDL headers came out I was in heaven.

I got all excited when Kylix came out, SDL had given me a taste of Cross platform developement so I went to the Linux Expo, chatted to the Borland guys and came out with the feeling that Borland were on my side and I could write some serious apps for Linux. I purchased it, installed it and was seriously dissapointed. It was basically a Wine Hack and now it doesn't even run on a newer Kernel. Shoddy. It was only Kylix 1, but from what I've heard, Kylix3 isn't much better.

Yesterday, I downloaded Free Pascal and Lazarus. It worked first time on Linux and after some minor code changes I got my Kylix game to compile. Kylix won't even run. I'm now looking forward to continuing the development of my game and releasing something soon...(ish)

But there is a nagging doubt in the back of my mind. I originally thought that .net was a fad, a novelty which would quickly dissapear.. that was 4 years ago.. Now I'm not so sure. The languages we use are generally the languages which will help us to get a decent programming job in the real world. So for games, it's C++, for Business it's VB.net, C# or Java

I don't see a place in the new business world for Delphi as an executable compiler and I think Borland see this too. Which is why they've gone to support the dark side. I hope I'm wrong on this point.

Pascal is a very good academic language. It's very clean and it doesn't let you get away with silly mistakes which would normally be allowed and would wreck a C++ program. The code structure is very tidy and easy to follow.
So its very good for learning how to code and code properly.
It certainly helped me.

I believe that as long as universities still support Pascal, it will never die completely but even though it has a strong following, programmers are easily persuaded when faced with future prospects and wads of cash.

Somewhere in this disjointed and long post is my opinion. That's all it is though, please feel free to disagree with it.

**WILL** · 03-01-2005, 07:03 AM

You make some very good points Jason. And Borland is indeed not acting like they have in the past. In fact they seem to be selling out at this point.

I have always considered Borland compilers above all other in the past, since I started coding. But lately... I finally find myself looking for alternatives to the crap that they are producing now. Linux is the most popular OS today, dispite whoever is using it, it's name alone is more interesting than the usually hear 'Windows' we speak without thought.

They dropped the ball with CLX IMO. This is a stupid move for a company that needs to look innovative. And to make things worse they say nothing about it, to think that we won't notice. Making them look even more like yuppies for sale.

This is obviously a sore issue for me as I'm sure it is for others. But regardless I truely believe that though Borland's Delphi may die, Pascal and Object Pascal will definately not.

**McCLaw** · 03-01-2005, 07:31 AM

Delphi, Die?

I think not.

When I first started coding, I was a a VB developer (Shamefully drops his head)

I thought VB what the be all and end all.

A friend of mine started me on Delphi, and after 1 week, I completely dropped VB, and have never gone back to it.

I dabbled in java, c++, cobol, and a host of other "smaller" languages, and I am currently a c# developer, but I still use Delphi Daily.

I have not found any other language/ tool that gives me the same or better results (Speed, readability and reliability)

I believe in Delphi to the extent that we have based the future of our game company on borland keeping Delphi alive.

One thing that I didnt like was that D8 could not compile win32

This was HUGE issue for me, since you just cannot get the speed needed for a game out of a .net app.

I feel much better now that d2005 can compile to win binaries again.

The only way Delphi will die is if no-one uses it anymore, and I just cannot see that happening.

I do feel that Borland has made a mistake not supporting Kylix any more, since releasing a game for more than one platform gives it more credibility.

Just my 2 cents

**Traveler** · 03-01-2005, 09:17 AM

IMO, its is very simple. Delphi will remain alive, as long as people continue to work with it.

The TCP Index for August 2004, says it all, Delphi popularity has increased a lot. In fact, acoording to the numbers it surpasses june 2001.

So, no, Delphi will not die!

**savage** · 03-01-2005, 01:34 PM

I think it Borland do not pick up the ball and get Delphi back to being a premier tool, then FreePascal is possible the natural sucessor. Once Lazarus gets more developers to help flesh out the IDE I think it will be quite competitive.

As I said in my earlier post, interesting times ahead in the Object Pascal native compiler arena

.

**McCLaw** · 03-01-2005, 01:48 PM

So when will we see pascal on the xbox/gamecube/PS ?

*waaaayyyyyy off topic*

**savage** · 03-01-2005, 02:25 PM

Well there is already someone looking at getting Gnu Pascal to work for the Game Boy Advance over @ http://www.pgd.netstarweb.com/viewtopic.php?t=1668, I think it can happen, but it needs people to take the time to work out what needs to be done to get FreePascal or Gnu Pascal working on Playstation, XBox or GameCube.

**TheLion** · 03-01-2005, 03:48 PM

I think one of the reasons that Borland is having a hard time is the price of their compilers. A few months back I decided I wanted to buy a compiler so I could finally start selling some of the things I wrote. So being a Delphi developer by nature I went to the Borland website and looked at their prices and noticed that the cheapest Delphi version was the Personal edition, however this one is restricted for personal use and you cannot commercially sell software created with it, so that one was of no use to me. Then there is the Professional edition which costs $999,-- (for new users) which I'm totally not prepared to pay for a compiler, at least not for the things I wanted to sell with it, simply because I will not make enough profit to get that kind of money out of it.

To make a long story short in the end I went with Visual C++ .NET 2003 Standard for about 109 euros excl. VAT (with VAT it came down to about 150 euros, which is around the $145,--). I kinda learned to appreciate Visual C++ and it has some really neat features, but I think I would develop at least 2x faster with Delphi.

Now if you put this little story in a new context, say you are a programmer who just comes from school and you learned Visual Basic in school (weirdly enough it seems to be the weapon of choice for school) and you decide to start a small company and you want to do this without a loan. So you go browsing around for a good compiler and you come on the Borland Delphi website and you see $999,-- then you come on the Visual C++ website and you see $110,-- which one will you chose if you haven't had any experiences with either of the language and you heard equally good things about both?

I still think Borland should make a cheaper version of Delphi, I think a lot more people will try it and a lot more small companies will start using it since it's simply the fastest development tool around. The only one that comes close to the development speed is Visual Basic, but that one would be renamed Visual Turtle if it was up to me when it comes to application speed!

just my 2 cents!

(sorry about the length of this thing, but sometimes I need a lot of words to make my point clear)

**Sly** · 03-01-2005, 10:21 PM

Originally Posted by TheLion

To make a long story short in the end I went with Visual C++ .NET 2003 Standard for about 109 euros excl. VAT (with VAT it came down to about 150 euros, which is around the $145,--). I kinda learned to appreciate Visual C++ and it has some really neat features, but I think I would develop at least 2x faster with Delphi.

Just remember that the Standard edition of VC++.NET does not have the optimizing compiler. To get the optimizing compiler, you have to go for the Professional edition, or download the free command-line version.

Borland is slowly killing Delphi, except if you get all wet and excited over database or web applications. That is where Borland's focus is firmly planted, to the detriment of the rest of the product.