Abstracting Graphical APIs

[Anton]

Anywhay we are getting a bit off topic here. I just hope that we haven't scared Anton with to much information here

@Anton
How ever you decide I'm sure you can count on the help from more knowlegable pepole here on PGD when you will need it.
Unfortuantely I can't count myself into that group but if you will need any help in working with classes I belive I could be usefull as I belive I have pretty god knowlege about them. Not so much about interfaces but that is mostly becouse I myself don't see the need to use them. So far I have always managed to solve everything with classes alone.

Oh, on the contrary, I find everything very interesting. I didn't post anything since I solved my problem by not making such a layer. Thanks for your help. I'm now writing a small library for rendering in D3D11. About interfaces, for the last year or two I began to love working with interfaces.

As for FMX I can't really comment, since I have no experience with it. The only thing I know is from other people that it is heavy in terms of performance.

My passion is for my game engine I'll hopefully get some appreciation for my engine one day and I can live with downplaying my UI work so that you may get the maximum respect for something you're passionate about too

This is very interesting. Can you tell more? What features do you plan/support in your engine /do you have a demo video?

You now, I grow up too with turbo pascal and Delhi1/2/3 and it was a fabulous period : I was angry when people compare it to VisualBasic

it should be right up there on the front page of Slashdot, not laughed about in some random comments at the bottom of a post about alternative languages.

Yeah, this is sad. Very often I meet people with novice skills on programming (in lets say C/C++) to tell me that it Delphi/Pascal is not a serious language (more like something which someone invented because he had much free time) but maybe this is more a mainstream unconscious view, rather than objective. Most of the times when I mention "Delphi" often people ask me "Does anyone use this anymore?" BTW, I have seen forums with people fighting C against C++, so what's left for C++ against Delphi.

[SilverWarior]

Yeah, this is sad. Very often I meet people with novice skills on programming (in lets say C/C++) to tell me that it Delphi/Pascal is not a serious language (more like something which someone invented because he had much free time) but maybe this is more a mainstream unconscious view, rather than objective. Most of the times when I mention "Delphi" often people ask me "Does anyone use this anymore?" BTW, I have seen forums with people fighting C against C++, so what's left for C++ against Delphi.

When I talk with other programmers about Delphi/Objet Pascal their response is usually something like this:
1. Programmer that have never done any programming in Delphi/Object Pascal: "What Delphi? You can't do any serious application with it. You need much more than simply placing some components on the form."
And the main reason for their response to be like this is that Emb arcadero always advertise how Delphi comes with bunch of usefull components, Live Bindings, etc but rarely advertize any language properies. Only recently you could see a few of new language features being advertized like Generics, Advanced Referencing, etc.
2. Programmer that has athleast tried doing some programming in Delphi/Object Pascal: "That isn't a bad language but I don't think it is capable enough for some serious applications. There arent many usefull examples or libraries for it available."
3. Programmers that have done quite some prgramming in Delphi/Object Pascal but have switched to other programming languages: "Pretty good language, lacking some of the newest features. Has rather poor and dwindling comunity and its development IDE is verry expensive. So it is better that you switch to some mainstream language soon if you want to be able to get any programing job in the future".
What these guys fail to realize that they are the main reason why the comunity keeps getting smaller and smaller. But stayung wold mean that they wouldn't have acces to the newest windows features like those that come out in .NET programming language.

So one day I have asked one of them who migrated from Delphi/Object Pascal to Visual Studio/.NET: "Why have you decided to migrate to .NET?"
And his answer was: For the software I'm developing I requires access to NFC hardware."
So my next question was: "Isn't there a library for Delphi available that would support this."
He says: "No ther isnt."
So I ask him: "Have you considered making such library yourself?"
He looks at me and goes: "Are you crazy? Why should I spent several weaks or perhaps even a month designing and implementing such library if one already exists for .NET?"
So my next question was: "Could you share how much time have you spent porting your application from Delphi to .NET?"
His asnwer that he harldy said it was: "I have spent four months proting the code to .NET"
And my response was: "So you spent four months porting your whole application to .NET instead of spending one month implementing the missing library. It haredly seems woth it"
And then my final question was: "How many new bugs have crawled in during the porting of your program?"
I have never got the answer to the last question. I hues that is becuse I hit the nerve of that programmer with it. He definitly knew that the choice of porting the whole application to .NET just becouse of one library was a poor one but he wasn't prepared to admit it.

Anywhay when someone asks me as to which programming language they should use I usually say something like this:
"Chose the one whose sintax structure suits you more. It is definitly better to program in programming language that feels natural to you and lack some features becouse in the end you can probably implement them yourself rather than programming in a programming language that offers you all of the features but you are having problems with its sytax structure becouse it doesen't seems logical to you.
It is like talking in foregin language. You can easily learn meaing of certain words but if the languages syntax isn't logical to you you will have realy hard time creating a meaningfull sentace out of those words."

[Anton]

We are getting far away from the topic by the way

Yeah, I agree that everyone should use that language/tools which fits them better and makes them comfortable.
I see a tendency, anyway, that people would reject to learning something which looks simple, but prefer complex-looking thing (with more symbols, slashes, all kinds of braces, etcetra) for the aim that they look smarter in world's eyes (which I doubt is a smart choice by itself).