Delphi Xe5

[phibermon]

Lots of progress being made but all of these 'new features' and a lot more should of been available years ago. So much so that I personally see their inclusion as more akin to bug fixing than new features.

I'm an experienced business analyst yet I wouldn't need to see any figures at all to predict their dwindling revenue. It'd be a pretty good guess that they deliberately delayed Android support to hit a cross section of their customers twice. Which in itself is pretty foul business practice. And if that's not accurate then it means that it took them all this time just to finish the support when the platform has been available for five years. Which gives me about as much confidence in their technical ability as I have in say, my cat's.

I really hope they do well with XE5 but I'll keep my efforts focused on FPC + Lazarus for now. I only care about the future of my language, my projects. FPC is the safest long term bet, if Delphi ever got axed and Windows 9/10 whatever dropped the Win32 API or future Androids/IOSes became API/binary incompatible with current editions then I'd be screwed if I'd bought into Delphi. You can always guarantee that FPC + Lazarus will support the newer platforms, even if you have to add support yourself. Ergo why take the risk on Delphi at all? it *still* doesn't offer any 'killer app' like features over FPC+Lazarus, if anything, given platform support, it's the other way round.

EDIT : In the interest of fairness, many would have valid arguments if they said the Delphi IDE was far more streamlined than Lazarus with more advanced debugging as well as it's various visual design tools. And one would hope that their very expensive compiler that's been under development for many years produces faster, more stable code than the open source FPC.

That's assuming of course - that the people that work on the compiler are not the same people that work on / maintain the headers/code that makes up their 'standard library' because if they are, then I wouldn't trust the compiler as far as I could throw it. Which isn't very far at all being an abstract, none physical thing.