Delphi XE2 is here!

[phibermon]

It does not mean FPC/Lazarus is the solution as in my own case I found moving to FPC/Lazarus very difficult because of several issues related to IDE functionality and the compilation process really eats up your time. Metaphorically speaking, when I move from Delphi XE 2 Beta IDE to Lazarus, it feels like I'm using Notepad.

Nobody said Lazarus was perfect If you've got the money then I wish you many happy coding sessions in Delphi XE2.

But I personally don't have any issues using FPC+Lazarus. It's an advanced cross platform solution that certainly doesn't feel like 'Notepad' when compared to commercial IDEs.

I've written and/or debugged complex systems, 3D Engines, Virtual Machines, Emulators and compilers. It provides me with all the tools I want and more importantly it supports all the platforms and architechtures I want to use.

For free? you can't argue that it's not good value for money

But Delphi? Nearly a thousand dollars to support a fraction of the platforms? umm, not for me.

I'm not against purchasing Delphi but I'll wait until they add native support in their compiler for ARM and PowerPC; add RTLs for Linux, Haiku; add support for JVM and LLVM etc etc etc

Delphi is a commercial quality product, it's synomynous with Visual Studio in it's quality and target Audience and it has commerical quality support for IOS which is a big thing that lots of people want. It's geared towards databases and money making, and all of that is needed and it's great for the OOP language.

FreePascal is more like GCC, it's an Open, vastly cross platform toolchain. It's for people that want to use their language of choice on all platforms, Linux, embedded systems etc

In my opinion, pretty much all the reasons someone would choose GCC over Visual Studio are the same reasons someone would choose FPC over Delphi.

Yes if I had the money I'd buy delphi, of course I would. But only if it produced faster code than FPC on it's target systems, which is quite likely does. at the moment.

FPC however is gearing up to support LLVM and unless Delphi supports it too then it'll never out-perform FPC because really it'll be trying to out-perform LLVM and if you don't know what that is, look it up and know that I'm right.

As stated in a previous post, embarcado should drop their native compiler, use FPC and focus on their IDE and libs. Plenty of big companies work on Linux, Apache, GCC etc for reasons that make sound commercial sence. I don't see how this is any different, FPC is without question going to dominate. It's probably got ten times the number of developers and they all work for free...

[LP]

But I personally don't have any issues using FPC+Lazarus. It's an advanced cross platform solution that certainly doesn't feel like 'Notepad' when compared to commercial IDEs.

Mouse scrolling doesn't work in IDE and you can't change this behavior. The code editor is unpredictable when setting tab/spaces to 1. Refactoring limited to the unit and not entire project. These are some issues I'm having, among others.

I've written and/or debugged complex systems, 3D Engines, Virtual Machines, Emulators and compilers. It provides me with all the tools I want and more importantly it supports all the platforms and architechtures I want to use.

Really? The debugger never worked for me. On stock installation, empty new project it always crashes, both on Vista and Win7, on 32-bit and 64-bit. On every machine I've tried. In the latest builds, it allows you to step 1-3 lines before crashing again. It's hard to believe you could actually use it to debug some complex project.

As stated in a previous post, embarcado should drop their native compiler, use FPC and focus on their IDE and libs.

I agree. There is not much innovation going on with Delphi's compiler when compared to FreePascal, which supported 64-bit and Mac OS since long time ago. I would actually like to see Delphi's integration with FPC even on Windows platform.

[WILL]

I have to admit that I'm rather disappointed in Embarcadero on their OS X/iOS/64-bit removal decision for Starter XE2. Mainly because they worked so hard to get us indies all riled and excited about Delphi again with a more cost effective edition then they they 'pull our pants off' by not including the new platforms in it's next major version.

Who else wants to get on the Mac or the iPad more then game developers? And what other denomination of indie developers makes games? So this was a little backhanded in my own personal opinion.

[czar]

Short-sighted stupidity - Embarcadero could certainly learn a thing or two about growing their user base and fans

[chronozphere]

I couldn't agree more.

I'm actually happy that I have some experience with FPC allready, because these issues really push me towards FPC. Delphi is just too expensive and has not enough features for the price you pay. I'm not willing to support that by buying the product, even if I would have the money.

The bigger problem is, as said, that the average age of experienced delphi programmers is growing. Embarcadero is creating it's own problem for the future.

[phibermon]

@Lifepower - Thank you very much for debating my points and you're quite right there are parts of the IDE that need some polish although I am suprised to hear you've experienced crashes during debugging, If you'll take my word for it I've not had an issue stepping through many lines of code and not experienced the behaviour you described.

If you've tried multiple builds and still experience that issue I just don't know what to say. Obviously you'd notice if your system was unstable in other ways. There's the outside possiblity that some memory masking rootkit/virus plauges some common link between your platforms or perhaps there's some bizzare in memory conflict with your antivirus or some other such thing, softice etc.

I must insist that you can debug without issue, perhaps someone else would be kind enough to validate.

---

I agree. There is not much innovation going on with Delphi's compiler when compared to FreePascal, which supported 64-bit and Mac OS since long time ago. I would actually like to see Delphi's integration with FPC even on Windows platform.

Even if it wasn't a complete replacement, it would be very nice to see support for switching between compilers although I suspect that they store very different forms of debug information in builds which may very well require quite a lot of work to intergrate into the Delphi environment (breakpoints, watches, decode views etc) although I might be wrong and they use somthing close to GDB.

[paul_nicholls]

I love the fact that according to the email from Embarcadero the other day, Delphi XE2 includes Android support!!

cheers,
Paul

[WILL]

I think they said Prism not Delphi. They are making the distinction from Delphi and their RemObjects partnership project this version.

I know David talked and talked about getting Delphi on everything. Android was one of those 'everythings'.

[paul_nicholls]

hmm...here is the bit from my email

Take a look at this! With RAD Studio XE2, you can now create…

NEW! 64-bit Delphi applications to take advantage of the latest hardware
NEW! Truly stunning visual business applications with FireMonkey™
NEW! High-performance Windows, Mac and iOS native applications
NEW! LiveBindings™ to connect any visual element to any type of data
NEW! Mobile and cloud connectivity to extend multi-tier DataSnap
NEW! Standalone mobile apps for iOS (iPhone/iPad) and Android
NEW! Mobile-optimized web applications

cheers,
Paul

[czar]

At the Auckland meeting they showed how to make an android project using radphp or prism - i can't remember - looked complicated