Abstracting Graphical APIs

[Vinzvega]

Hi Phibermon,

Thank you for your gentle response. I understand much better your reaction now.

Sorry on my side to not understand that more quickly.

I understand now too at what level you suffer about all the 5 last years of delphi actuality. I lived that with more distance, because not directly stuck with this market : I confess that when EMB bought the FMX technology from a component supplier and out DXE2 with IOS support throught FPC I honestly believe that was a proof of opening, and was very excited about. I was wrong. Sincerly, I'm just a little more optimist (naive ?) than you

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, in this time already, Delphi began to be not well understood : Native compiler, advanced VCL : tremendous.

Today, Delphi change (not the VCL, despite the fact it is alway supported, good point !) RTL change, low level change and this new GUI library. Then, come the first problem with compiler deprecation and FMX "yoyo" quality, and persistant bugs. I excused all of that for 2 reasons : FMX was young technology and EMB was (is) alone in the market to get a chance to put Pascal again in front scene. All the other compiler, despite their top technical quality, is far behind. It is sad, but it is.

So, I shared near of all your technical analyze of EMB act about delphi : It is unfortunally true. But when you enumerate all the problem in one time, it is so hard to hear :/
In fact, the fact that EMB target only money (It is a Fund, behind EMB, and this is terrible for a firm, nothing count unless money behind the corporate action holder decision) is a kind of justification of the sad way taken by delphi today.

But I want to be more optimist : Perhaps, from those bad seeds, could grow again a beautifull and strong tree ? I hope. And for me, community is very important for that, but I see here and elsewhere (torry, Delphi.de) that community is less and less present. That is entirely the consequence of EMB act. You right again.
The worst, is that after all this heavy delphi break, EMB try with a new brand (appmethod) to get new people : I think this a loss of energy : Hope it will have good consequence on Delphi EcoSystem, but I doubt.

Hope, as you do, all will be better later. After the war, there are rebirth. Normally..

If, as a redemption, you make a Tetris in FMX, I'll install FPC (command line) and start make OpenGL stuffs with it right this afternoon !
(Ok, it is not really a punishment, but what to do else ?)

By !

[phibermon]

Hi Phibermon, Thank you for your gentle response. I understand much better your reaction now.!

Thank you for being gracious and accepting my apology

I would dearly love to see Delphi at the top of the tree again. A product that I can say to anybody "You want to make games? 3D applications? you want to get to market faster with a more stable code-base than your competitors? use Delphi". I do understand why EMB have made the push with FMX, I totally get it - I really do. I just think they're totally wrong in doing so. I'm sure that mobile platforms were at the top of the wish list for users - I'm also sure that what they wished for was comparable support to C++, access to the standard API's. EMB ticked the right box, they used the wrong pen.

Delphi is great, 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. At the very minimum, the commercial, expensive Delphi should be far better and more capable than a free alternative. They're getting paid to make it, it should be the best.

Sadly that's not true, Freepascal (and in many IDE respects, Lazarus) supports far more platforms, has a more complete (and standard) API for all of the mobile platforms - it's just a better compiler.

I'm happy that I've got a good cross platform Object Pascal compiler. I can do *everything* (sans target some specific propitiatory platforms like the Xbox) in Object Pascal that I can do with C++. There's nothing but my skill and time stopping me. But that's thanks to Freepascal. It *should* be thanks to Delphi.

Delphi (XE7) at absolute minimum price of £1526 to target all supported platforms, I can only hope to match my C++ rivals on Windows. That's it. I sure as hell can't compete on IOS and Android without access to the standard API and FMX taking up resources I need and enforcing a design I can't work with.

I think that's rather sad :\ I would love to see Delphi at the top of the tree, I've loved it, I've been dedicated to it. I was *proud* to be a Delphi developer.

Delphi is arguably a better IDE than Lazarus and does have some fantastic RAD database components - but at the price of a small car to get the functionality everybody else gets as standard, it's not enough. Especially without Linux support (And I'll be kind and forget the rest)

They should cater for us too, the lone games developers, the small teams. Games are the biggest source of revenue on mobile platforms, it's a fact. And I and everybody else here says Object Pascal is a fully capable language for game development, we know it is, we're doing it right now. In Freepascal - again, it should be Delphi. Would it really kill them to give us a cross platform Delphi at a decent price? dump all of the components! give us a cross platform compiler and the Delphi IDE, surely EMB can do that at a price we can afford? Their price list is proof that it's the components that make up a vast amount of the cost. Starter + Mobile pack would be £713! I'd *almost* stretch to that (with Linux support) just to be able to use the Delphi IDE. But I've got to pay £800 more for a bunch of components I don't want just to be able to target Android and IOS?

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Off topic.

I think we should all agree not to discuss religion, politics or EMB pricing