Light Edition of Delphi at a Low Cost

[WILL]

The price of a copy of Delphi has been pretty high for a good few years now. With all the new initiatives Embarcadero is putting forward, Delphi for Mac OS X and Delphi for Linux for example, we might also see a new cost friendly version of Delphi in the near future too.

If you were to limit what is included in this lighter Delphi, what essential features would you keep.

[Andru]

Only compiler and some other tools, without any VCL stuff... but with FreePascal I don't need Delphi anymore

[User137]

The 7 first ones are things you can't really code anything without. I don't only make games but tools and small apps aswell. Modern Delphi versions however have tons and tons of carbage that weren't mentioned in the list. .NET and whatever really i haven't been interested in the slightest to even study them.

Lazarus is still lightweight and has all the Delphis good functionality i need.

[WILL]

Well the trick with Lazarus is stability. If you want to do RAD Laz falls a little short. Documentation as well Lazarus isn't 100% rock solid, thought it's not terrible either. Delphi has it all and a big team testing it with a huge userbase, except cross-platform, but that'll come really soon I'm sure.

Free Pascal is a good compiler an is ver functional, but without the nice IDE development is still slowed down to whatever you are using. I like Lazarus, but if I want to develop on Mac OS X, then it's just not there yet. With the new Delphi for Mac OS X coming, I might be jumping back onto the Delphi wagon. Embarcadero is picking up speed on their tools especially with all the other cool R&D stuff they are doing in the background.

[Andru]

WILL
I don't know what do you mean about "Lazarus stability", because all the time, that I spend developing my projects(first my GUI project was some program for diploma in University), I have no problems with it But yeah, there was some problems with debugger first time, now it works ok... but it not so powerful like a debugger in Visual Studio for C++(I use it at work ) and not so good like in Delphi, but this is not a big problem.

[Stoney]

Personally, a compiler/linker, code editor and form designer (and with a form designer probably some form of VCL would be required) would be enough for me. I never really cared about databases, web components or fancy component stuff.
As for Delphi for Mac OS X and Linux, as far as I know there isn't going to be a cross-platform Delphi IDE, just a cross-compiler from Delphi for Windows. Or did I miss some big news?

While I agree, Lazarus on Mac OS X is not as confortable to use as on Windows, it is definitely ready for developing all kinds of projects with. (I did some some freelance GUI work with it, a few programs for university and a lot of open-source/freeware applications.)
I guess if the Lazarus team develops their own debugger instead of using GDB this would.
Btw: For cross-platform development I would recommend to grab a November build of Lazarus where build macros are activated by default. So you can have one .lpi for one project instead having one .lpi for each platform you want to support. (Especially if you consider how much custom linker stuff you have to add when developing with SDL on Mac OS X.)

[JSoftware]

I don't see myself going back to Delphi. Those days I need a lowlevel compiler that can compile to ARM, x86, x86_64, and hopefully soon RX62N too

The only way I see it becomming just a bit more popular was if they provided a Standard version without all the bells and whistles. Throw away databases and all that. Like Delphi 7 Standard, or maybe even Turbo Delphi

I could buy a few years supply of beer for the price of Delphi today. I wouldn't make enough money of either, but one of them would get me drunk

[Sascha Willems]

I voted for Compiler/Linker, IDE and Debugger. I already tried Lazarus several times, and though it's great for smaller projects, it was a terrible experience when I tried to move Projekt "W" over to Lazarus. Yes, my current Turbo Delphi also has problems with this big project (I have to restart it several times a day as it gets to it's memory size limitation of ~1.4 GBytes due to memory leaks in the IDE I suppose, though I even installed DelphiSpeedUp to make it a bit better), but Lazarus would slow me down a lot.

First is the linker (and to an extend the compier) of FPC which is pretty slow compared to the Delphi one. Don't unterstand me wrong, I'm totally thrilled at what the FPC guys do, but they are more about features than linking speed. And if you do frequent changes and compile/link often with such a big project, every second spend linking is a second too much.

Second is the debugger. This is a part where Delphi has always been incredible and getting such a functionality for some open source project will always be hard. If you'd ask me about the best debugger in the world, I'd say "Delpi's" without havng to think about it for a second. It's perfectly integrated into the IDE, it's quick, it's easy to use and offers a lot of features that makes debugging even hard bugs an "easy" task. I'm pretty sure that some of the nasty bugs in Projekt "W" (mostly the AI ones) would've been a real pain to locate with an inferior debugger. Yes, debugging in Lazarus has improved a lot over the last years, but it's still far behind Delphi.

And the last one is the IDE. Delphi's IDE has been formed by decades of knowledge and has a great workflow, is lightining fast (though Turbo Delphi tends to crash, but let's just say we stopped after Delphi 7 ) nad easy to use. Although this one is the least important, as Lazarus' IDE isn't that far away and especially when doing 3D games, where you don't need things like the VCL (though I use it a lot for the editos of my game) it's already great to use.


And yes, I want a new Turbo Delphi (as I said, the "current" one tends to crash often and has memory leaks etc.), and as for me they could just leave out all the database stuff and release just a basic new Turbo Delphi that's tailored more to the hobby community.

[code_glitch]

Even though I dont use Delphi myself, I know people that do. I thought I might as well vote for them: VCL, Object model, Debugging and the basics...

[WILL]

Yeah Delphi is known for it's great debugger and it's debugging tools so it could be seen as a staple for any edition of Delphi light or the architecture editions.

Also, I'd like everyone that can to vote on this as possible. This is information that I think could become very useful in the near future.