Light Edition of Delphi at a Low Cost

[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.

[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.

[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...

[WILL]

(bump) I know not everyone has voted on this yet.