Light Edition of Delphi at a Low Cost

[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.

[DarkBow]

The poll does not allow to answer this, but I would vote for a trimmed down version of the VCL. Say, for example, the basic visual components both in database and normal flavors.

[noeska]

Although i choose not for database components it should remain possible to add custom database components yourselves like sqlite.
And i as said before the vcl should only include the basic components. But again it should be possible to add your own.

So a light delphi should be more like the delphi7 personal edition then the later turbo delphi's that did not allow to add custom/third party components.

In fact that with the new xe delphi that suposedly also inlcludes older versions of delphi i think embracadero should re-release delphi7 personal edition as a lighweight delphi for 'hobby'-programmers.

[WILL]

Yeah, I think that excessive amounts of components that are not normally used for small applications and games would be a waste on us here and for someone just learning to work with these tools. And I'm not too fond of limiting the adding new components and libraries, that sort of cripples innovation by the indie developer crowd who do all these neat things with the component system.

But I'd personally like Delphi to be more accessible to individuals who aren't heavy developers or are just simply basement code monkeys and just want to get into making shareware games and apps, much like id Software and Appogee were, and be able to get their toes just under the door to start out. This is my personal vision of the tool, sort of back to where we were with Turbo Pascal back in the DOS era. I think when software became 'big business' so did the tools and we have to get back to the basics for the young newcomers and the small guys who like to sit and do it for fun. That's where all the creativity comes from anyways, not a big stuffy office or cubicle.

[code_glitch]

Hmm... You're not plotting a deal with them are you? Like a special Pascal Gamer Delphi (Excuse the Pun [PGD]) or PGDD-SE (Pascal Game Development/Developpers' Delphi Special Edition)??

It would be interesting if we could...

[WILL]

lol No nothing all that secretive behind the scenes. But this information and your ideas are useful in helping them to decide what they would need or not need in a version that they could sell to us at a price that we don't have to sell our vital organs on eBay to afford.

Though a Game Developer's Edition would be super cool. Pre-bundled SDL, OpenGL and DirectX headers, etc...

[arthurprs]

Everything but the last 3.

edit: Turbo versions were good (but not great), delphi need them back!

[Luuk van Venrooij]

There actually is a pretty good light version already here which I used for a while:

---link removed---

Its based on the latest turbo delphi and has a large number of fixes and speedups wrapped in a small 80 mb package. Not sure if this is legal though.