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Kylix in Limbo
IgD writes "Kylix, Borland's Linux port of their popular Delphi compiler has been covered on Slashdot before. LinuxWorld is reporting that Kylix development is in limbo. Many speculate this is a politically correct way of saying the project has been abandoned. There hasn't been any updates to Kylix 3.0 in well over a year. One user who attended BorCon this year wrote in his blog that Borland didn't have any updates to Kylix planned for 2004. This is really disheartening news. Why didn't Kylix sell? Does this say something about the application or about the difficulties of marketing a commercial Linux application?"
I don't know much about Delphi, but I know a good deal of Java, and it seems that the "new thing" for Linux is Java.
I'm sure there's a market for Delphi, but why not just use C or C++?
Does this say something about the application or about the difficulties of marketing a commercial Linux application?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the problem may lie with Delphi, dontcha think?
By comparison, even if you could port a Windows app over to Linux tomorrow, that doesn't mean that every company out there is going to do it.
The opposite of progress is congress
So, Red Hat isn't good for homes, and this isn't good for commerical use. Does this mean Linux is out of the game? No. It just means there's diffrent distros for diffrent things. FP, by the way.
Why didn't Kylix sell?
.NET 2003 Enteprise Architect Edition.
Well, did you buy any licenses, you GNU hippies?
Oh, and expect the product manager to say that home users better stick to Visual Studio
Maybe the developers it was aimed at adopted Eclipse instead?
No FP for you.
Off topic... but the quote struck a nerve.
"If you can't resuscitate the patient, remove the feeding tube," the attendee said. "Don't just let it linger in a vegetative state."
As a doctor, it kills me that they are making a symbol out of that poor little girl. Please let my spouse decide what is best for me.
There's a difference in being alive and really "being alive."
Maybe it had something to do with the 1000+ price you had to pay for the full developer version? You think?
... hello to increasing "Shareholder Value".
Oh yes, Borland has come a long way since Phillipe's idea of a full blown compiler as good (if not better) than anything on the market for 99 bucks. Gone are the days of Turbo Pascal and Turbo C
And Helloooo to you too linux you cutie...you're looking better by the minute!
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Huh?
Delphi, with its ability to write Windows programs, was having trouble enough. Once Visual Basic came along, it really stole a lot of their thunder in terms of making it easy to write windows programs.
..... yup, small marketshare.
So now you look at a platform like Linux, with a minority marketshare, and look at Delphi with its already small marketshare.... that adds up for
Oh, don't forget dotnet and java, both of which have a lot of muscle behind them.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
When you have a multitude of free (beer), easy to use dev tools already out there for a platform, it's gonna be tough to push a product such as this. The biggest use I can see for it is to port apps, and even that doesn't seem to be quite popular.
I got a +5, Troll
I've been using Kylix for about 3 months now, and I've reached the stage of considering completely abandoning Kylix and continuing with linux native C++ and Qt.
:= ''. If I
remove that line there is no problem. This is definately weird stuff.
.ico files.
I've been developing a file manager which makes use of the components below. With every component I've described issues I've found with them.
TApplication:
- Some very weird bug caused spontaneous segmentation faults during the Application.run command. I traced the cause of the segmentation fault the a line similar to Form1.Edit1.caption
TForm:
- Assigning and reading the top and left properties during form creating will give wrong results and in some cases cause the form to be put in the wrong place.
TMainMenu, TPopupMenu:
- The BeforeDrawMenuItem gets buggy if boldfaced characters are used.
TListView:
- Drag and Drop implementation is completely screwed up. Whether I use CLX OnDragStart kind of commands or code which calls Qt directly, drag and drop operations will give rise to strange mouse behavior.
- Multiselect and Drag 'n Drop is not compatible. I've had to rewrite all the mouse handling in order to be able to drag 'n drop and select items. I had to deny all mouse events to CLX in order for everything to work.
- Multiple columns and an Imagelist will cause images to be displayed in the subcolumns even if the imageindex is -1.
- OnDrawItem fails miserably. In the first place there is no direct way of knowing what column your are drawing the information for. In the second place the canvas provided to draw on stretches beyond other columns. If you drag the scrollbars the drawed data gets screwed up.
-TTreeView
The TTreeView has all the same problems as the TListView, as they both are based on Qt's QListView
-TCoolBar & TToolbar
A Ttoolbar on a TCool bar gives a wrong height property for buttons on the toolbar. A Toolbar sometimes spontaneously gives itself another position on my form. This is not reproducible and happens occasionally.
General Problems:
-The FindFirst command is very limited. Instead of providing all items available in a TStatBuf buffer it does some translation to windows which eliminates some of linux's cool aspects like symbolic links. Directories and System files are indistinguishable because of bad code in CLX.
- On my Redhat 7.2 computer using Kylix is one big Illegal Operation festival.
- On my Redhat 7.1 computer I can't use the debugger because it WILL crash after 4-9 debug cycles.
- Icon support is really bad. The kylix code is unable to decode almost all ordinary
These are just some issues which I can think of at the moment. There are more. During development of this program I've spent more than 50% of my time solving problems with Kylix. This consists of either looking for workarounds, changing CLX code, calling Qt directly, or rewriting components entirely. So many functions provided by Qt are not available in Kylix, which in some cases severely limits the functionality of the Kylix components. The only things which went well were calls which bypassed CLX or used LibC. I'm seriously considering dumping kylix and using Qt directly. I've gotten fed up with having to debug Borland's attempt at a layer between Qt and their compiler. I don't feel like waiting for Kylix version 3.0 or whatever in which they've hopefully solved all these issues. I hope someone will convince me otherwise because I believe Kylix has great potential. I've been using Delphi for some time now and I love Delphi. It has been a great disappointment to see Kylix fail.
The problem with Kylix was it's price. Borland was charing a ridiculous price for a product that albeit good wasn't worth the price. It's also hard to convince your boss (atleast in my situation) that Linux was free and came with C/C++ compilers but I had to pay for Kylix.
If they had a reasonable price perhaps it wouldn't flown but lets be realistic, it's not going to get a lot of support without having a cheap price or an open source version available.
Kylix didn't sell because it was a pile of crap. I used to do a lot of stuff with Delphi (paid lots of money to Borland too), but when I ditched Windows I felt no incentive to carry on with Kylix. I tried the Open Edition, and it wasn't a patch on Delphi. Klunky, buggy, lousy unportable code. Not worth it.
I didn't hear all that much from Borland about it. Sad to hear that it will be in Limbo.
On Linux, there is a cornucopia of free programming languages and tool boxes ready to use. Why then should I use a commercial closed implementation of a proprietary non-standard language with non-standard libraries, not portable beyond merely Linux and Windows, and then only some versions of those?
I don't mind spending big bucks on good tools. After all, it is magnitudes more expensive to familairize oneself with new tools than actually buying them. But I do mind when my favourite tools suddenly become deprecated at the mere whim of a corporate - and Borland has a poor track record here.
Thus, no matter how good the performance of Kylix, and no matter how excellent and slick the IDE and libraries, I would not touch it with a ten foot pole unless I have some guarantee that I will be able to access the full source when I really need to.
Most people knowledgeable enough to develop on Linux have been burnt in the past by proprietary tools, have learnt expensive and painful lessons that way. Never more! Our freedom is too precious to sell out ever again.
GPL it! :)
As a software developer, I need to pay the bills - back when I was single I didn't much to survive, but once you add in wife, three children, etc, you really need to pay attention to the bottom line.
I'm in the process of developing a commercial app for Linux that I'm hoping will bring in sufficient revenue for me to dedicate a reasonable portion of my time to - but I can't deny that it's not without a certain amount of trepidation.
Consider how 'big' Perl is to the open source community, or PHP, or Python - and then consider how many people can afford to work full-time on them. It's a fairly sobering thought.
linux users don't like using apps which were half-ported using a windows emulator (see wordperfect, winamp3)
you want to make gui apps? use the qt or kde libraries. use gtk even. you want a gui app in an easier language? use pyqt, pykde, or even pygtk. perl-gtk if you're really desperate. kylix doesn't offer anything over these. I personally made a few pyqt apps in a matter of hours (see pysp), how much easier can it get?
who wants to distribute 40 megs of libraries with their application? I don't remember exactly how many libraries kylix need[s|ed], but it was fairly stupid
I signed up to download kylix, and I started getting flyers in my mailbox (my physical mailbox) from borland. nobody wants that.
enough said
again...enaugh said
Ever programmed in Delphi? I rest my case. Kylix had zero mindshare and for a programming language, free or not, this is the kiss of death. Its a hard enough struggle for good free/open tools like Python and Ruby to make incursions into the Java/Perl/C/C++ world...let alone a half-baked expensive commercial product.
Kylix had been in the running as the tool we'd use when we start a complete rewrite of our companies flagship product. cross platform is one of the major requirements set down by the boss and kylix seemed quite good. When testing/evaluating it had a few bugs and we also had the issue of the majority of our programmers are not C++ gods, but it was still quite high on the list. The high license cost was another issue that we had to consider. $25,000 in licences for a company that sells $1,000,000 a year is a lot. In case your wondering other platforms being concidered are Java- Jbuilder with DB to be determined. Something called majik the boss likes, I've yet to see anything on this so I can't comment. Oracle is saying we can do everything using forms. I don't believe them. Or my choice Java with a postgres DB. This is for a moderately complex POS system. The big issue is how close to losing money our company is at any given point. Profit was a whole $25,000 last year. In my mind big software costs are both pointless and out of our cababilities if they don't give us a huge return on investment. Yes the linux desktops aren't as slick and easy to use as win 2k would be, but the cost of work arounds are far below the cost of 15 win 2k licenses. The same thinking has to be applied to our new toolset.
Some of the problems might have been that you had to run one of the mass market distros to even get the installer to run.
Obviously Gentoo was out - so I couldn't install it there.
Atop RH 8 it ran like a dog, slower than molasses. Turning off the antialiasing helped, but not that much. The Win32 version was much more responsive. It appeared like the environment was running in some kind of emulation layer.
It didn't use the GNU toolchain so porting the apps was nigh unto impossible.
It didn't seem like a winner, and I happen to like Delphi...
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
IgD writes:
I didn't see a trace of that in either the article or the blog...
Then in the blog:
So no, it hasn't really been abandoned. It's just Borlands usual way of releasing stuff.
I bought Kylix 3.0, and my biggest complaint with it is that it feels like a Windows program forced to run on Linux. Not just the IDE (which uses WINE to run), but the language implementation itself.
:-)
It feels like the developers have hardly used it itself, and I guess that's why it just isn't as much of a pleasure to use as (say) Turbo Pascal was.
I love having a decent pascal compiler for Linux, and I like the fact that I can recompile my code on Windows, but I keep bumping into things that just shouldn't be the way they are.
For example: I have triggered segfaults when exceeding boundaries on arrays. Excuse me? I'm using a typesafe language with bounds checking specifically enabled. I expect the program to halt on the line of code that is attempting to access an out of bounds address BEFORE said access happens. I expect all variables to be current and correct. I expect to be able to see exactly what went wrong exactly as it happened. That's one of the reasons to use pascal. I'm paying 5% overhead for that luxury, now hand it over!
The other reason to use pascal is the fast compile times, which is great.
I'm happy to have a pascal compiler with a nice IDE and neat rapid application development stuff for applications, and I use it by preference. It just feels unpolished and rough.
Oh, yeah, shipping apps sucks too - they require you to make wrappers and point LD_* things to shared libraries that you have to identify yourself. VERY MESSY and STUPID. Let me make static apps if I have to, but I get pissed off when the recommended solution for messiness is to wrap every executable I make in a script. Yuk. Not likely.
*sigh* So I guess Love/Hate it is.
Love pascal. Loved Turbo Pascal. Like Kylix. Hate icky stupid bits in Kylix.
Kylix devs should be forced to eat their dogfood. When they release a fully functional IDE written in Kylix, I will be willing to believe they have actually used it. Until then, I'll use it anyway, and occasionally rant in public.
---
When it comes to selling stuff, my old man always says "there's a lot more people with 5 bob in their pocket than 5 quid."
I like Delphi, but having to spend $1,500+ to buy it means I tend to skip versions nowadays.
I remember buying Turbo Pascal for about $90.
Perhaps Borland would sell a lot more copies of Delphi and Kylix if it was $150 instead of $1,500.
um .. maybe it says more about how
o - delphi doesn't fill an unfilled niche
o - the free alternatives are more than
adequate
i get this image of all the slashdot editors just
printing out all these submissions then squatting
over them, taking a dump and posting the ones that
stink the most
Isn't that about the price of many of the more popular IDEs? VS.NET Professional sticker price is also $999 ( check amazon for instance ).
Oh yes, Borland has come a long way since Phillipe's idea of a full blown compiler as good (if not better) than anything on the market for 99 bucks.
Borland has one of the best IDEs I've used, definately the best Java IDE I've used as a *free* download. I have never needed to use anything that's not available in the JBuilder Personal edition.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Not my area really, but I know I've got a buddy working on the Lazarus project:
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org
Might be of some interest to some Delhpi folks.
Does this say something about the application or about the difficulties of marketing a commercial Linux application? No, what it says to me is that most (certainly not all, but most) Linux users are doing so because they're too tight-arsed to pay for a real operating system. And why get your OS for free if you have to pay for the apps to run on it?
I've done some commercial development work in Delphi. It's a great environment in Windows. It's easier and faster to write than C++, it runs faster than Visual Basic or Java, and it compiles ridiculously fast. Hundreds of thousands of lines a second! Coming from C++ that is amazing, and the execution speed is pretty comparable to C/C++. It nicely wraps the Windows API and UI development is very easy.
Unfortunately, Delphi is a marginal product on Windows (for various reasons), and Windows is the platform most software development efforts target. Move it to Linux, even if you can capture the same percentage of the development market on Linux, you now have a marginal product on a marginal operating system. Not gonna work.
An additional problem is: Linux runs on a myriad of platforms, x86, PowerPC, unix workstations, you name it. Kylix/Delphi work on x86 ONLY, so although code will be portable between windows and linux, it will never be portable to any other platform. This is a problem that would be very difficult to fix, if you look at the VCL much of it is written in x86 assembler, it will take a long time, and require much effort to port it to another platform. This portability problem further reduces the market share that Kylix could ever achieve.
And then there is the problem of price, enough other people have pointed this out, so I won't repeat them. But yeah, expensive.
Just my 2 cents.
-Spyky
Would you really want to create a product for 1000 different distros that break your software every release of the distro? Miguel got at this the other day and was talked about at JOS http://snurl.com/2vc9 As a community Linux preaches standards ad nauseum, yet there is no standard Linux distro and no vendors listen to LSB. So cry all you want when the ISV's won't write for your platform. Besides, its all easy enough for granny to write a little shell script to do that task anyway. Mod me up, mod me down. No matter, I speak truth.
Linux users by their nature are averse to paying for software. I would rather roll my own stuff using Java, Tcl, PHP, etc. and then not be dependent on a company like Borland.
I looked at Kylix as it looked cool but now it appears I was correct in avoiding it. I pity companies who try to sell software to people like me who are addicted to free (as in beer) software.
----- Refactoring is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a god.
Does this say something about the application or about the difficulties of marketing a commercial Linux application?
Both.
1. It's commerical 2. There are MUCH better alternatives under GNU/Linux: QT and GTK... both are solid, native frameworks used in the two most popular Desktop environments for GNU/Linux. They're also much more mature and aren't ports from VCL code written for Windows 10 years ago. Borland was just trying to get a share of the GNU/Linux market, but they failed - tough. GPL it! Hah! Riiight.
Who needs Kylix when you can write your GUIs in Python using wxWindows, GTK, or QT for FREE?
Who needs Kylix when you can write your GUIs in Perl using wxWindows, GTK, or QT for FREE?
Who needs Kylix when you can write your GUIs in C/C++ using wxWindows, GTK, or QT for FREE?
Notice a trend here? Oh, but there's more...
Linux is found on Open Source software. Why on earth would I write a program in a propietary language than costs $$$ that would be pointless to distribute to the rest of the Linux community because only *I* could compile it? Quite simply, I wouldn't. I'd write it in Java or Python because I know other Linux developers would have Java or Python.
I do not know a *SINGLE* developer who has Kylix, and I only know of one application our company uses that was written in Delphi. That application is a very specialized mortgage application and is not usefull to anybody outside the mortgage industry (and I even question it's usability inside the industry). To add insult to industry, they're planning a complete rewrite in C# for 2005.
Finally, we all know that Borland has been wishy-washy at best when it comes to their support of the Linux environment. The Interbase/Firebird fiasco is proof enough.
I wouldn't trust my money with them. They've been made irrelevant by Microsoft, SUN, *AND* Linux. They consistently and stubbornly refuse to get with the program. That's why nobody users their software anymore.
And Turbo Pascal used to be a really really damn good product. It's sad, really.
Bryan
... right, pretty quiet here. Everyone here wines about the fact that Delphi sucks, which it may very well but the fact of the matter is that the latest version of Kylix was also for C++.
That being said though, kylix sucked so hard that it could bring a bowling ball through a garden hose. Something about an environment that runs wine in the background just doesn't seem right. Sure it can help you make a cross compiling app but at what cost? Mainly the fact that Borland IDEs in general are just a little bit more buggy than you come to expect now days. We're not talking VB6 on win98 buggy, where you have to save every debug because it just 'may' crash the machine, but I hardly have a day using Builder where it doesn't die at least once.
----- - The beatings will continue until morale improves
I don't think Linux was Kylix's problem, I think .NET and Java is Kylix's problem.
But still, I can't think of a commercial application that seems to have strong sales on linux. Either the desktop or server.
Anyone?
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Bastard. :)
...Lazarus?
Most Delphi developers are at small shops. These shops just want cheap, quick, and reliable. We bought RH Linux to begin developing for Kylix. But we quickly abandoned the idea after spending two weeks trying to get our test system up and running properly. The modem and sound card we never could get working. Even if I had gotten it working, my customers would be unwilling to put up with this sort of hassle. My small shop does not have the resources to be able to support all the hardware configurations under Linux. Let Microsoft have that hassle. We will stick to our little nich.
You or I might get excited and go buy Linux books and stay up late night reading them. But the corporate world is filled with lazy people that don't care about computers. Like it or not, it would take several months to get these people up to speed with Linux. The reality of it is that the $99 saved by buying Linux instead of Windows is quickly sucked up in support and training costs. Windows is good enough, so no thanks... Now OS-X.. maybe!!!
Borland simply came too late to the Linux market, I see many more people using QT/gtk and other native tools now and Kylix probably did not have anything that the developers wanted.
It even came too late to have the Neverwinter Nights Toolset ported and usable in Linux.
StarTux
The only really good use I can think of at all for Kylix is reusing old code, not written with modern development tools in mind. But Kylix didn't work for that, since Windows Delphi and Kylix were apparantly incompatible.
Who in all the world would want an application development suite that thus had absolutely no use, especially given its price?
No, maybe it's a sign when you take a Windows program and make a half-assed attempt to 'port' it using Wine, it doesn't work right, you slap broken registration code on top of that, and the bosses shout "SHIP!", hopefully over the objections of the engineers.
The failure of Kylix is just another example of the free market working, and in this case the value of Kylix to the consumer is less than zero. That's right, Borland would have to pay me quite a bit to 'switch' to Kylix for anything. And it still might not be enough, if it kept crashing unexpectedly.
But hey, YMMV; that was just my experience with it. And note that I managed to restrain myself to the point that phrases like 'flaming piece of festering monkey shit' never escaped my lips!
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually I have had my best luck on Gentoo with Kylix. On Redhat, anything above 7.2 had problems with fonts in certain dialogs. On Suse it runs w/o a hitch but slow. On Gentoo it rocks and behaves like Delphi. The only catch was having to create a symlink to fake out the db access for postgres, kylix expects an older version number.
They should have designed their own duel licencing model like Mozilla or QT and charged $99 for a commercial licence to the product. They could then have spent most of their money enhansing and organizing the product and leaving quality assurance and bug fixes to the community and get a comercial product they could sell out of it.
I never liked C so (in the 80's) I used Turbo Pascal. When I saw C++ I thought it was even worse than C so I used Delphi. When Kylix went out I thought of buying it but I then discovered Ada... I never bought Kylix nor used Delphi again. Am I the only one?
Wasn't Delphi a pascal compiler? I was showed pascal in a class in languages. But I recieved much more education on C++, Java, Assembler and perl. My CS degree was almost all C++ & Java! I downloaded the trial version of Kylix, I didn't like it at all. I had a much easier time with C++, QT & KDevelop. And with eclipse, I can't see any reason for Delphi. Now Builder for Linux with either GTK-- or QT would rock.
I believe Kylix was designed for Delphi development from the beginning. I noticed recently Borland has released C++ BuilderX 1.0 (a Java-based C++ IDE), with Personal Edition available as free download. How will this affect the progress on Kylix? Any ideas?
Some of the problems might have been that you had to run one of the mass market distros to even get the installer to run.
Obviously Gentoo was out - so I couldn't install it there.
Hm. I've installed it at verious times on various Gentoo boxes. No issues. I had some font issues on a Debian box, but so far Kylix and Gentoo has been a very comfortable combination for me.
---
And isn't Pascal positively infamous in *nix circles for being the canonical
example of a language that binds the programmer up so tightly in stupid and
annoying rules that it's impossible to get anything accomplished? Isn't
Pascal the language where you can't return early from a subroutine or exit
early from a loop or control structure, for example? And isn't it also true
that people who use Linux tend as a general rule to dislike arbitrary and
pointless constraints such as these?
So, *why*, exactly, did Borland think Pascal would be a good language to sell
to Linux users? It could have been worse; they could have tried to sell us a
COBOL compiler, I suppose.
*shrug*. If they'd picked a language that's actually popular among *nix
geeks, it may have done better.
I should note that I'm commenting here on a reason why Delphi for Linux might
not sell well; I'm not implying that Delphi, having been derived from Pascal,
is necessarily as bad or as inflexible as Pascal per se. I'm only implying
that it would tend to be perceived that way, barring any knowledge to the
contrary, by Linux users who get their ideas about Pascal from the general
sentiment in the *nix community, or from the jargon file.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Okay, this is sorta OT, but this has been puzzling me for a long time..
I've been using Delphi for ages now, and I really like it.. because of my affinity with Delphi, when I learnt C++ I started using Borland C++ Builder (Basically, like Delphi, but C++ flavour) - I also use DJGPP and others, but anyways..
Delphi has a huge following.. everyone seems to like something about it, and it's extremely popular for games development.. which really leads me to wonder why almost noone uses BCB? - I think it's now been superceded by some other Borland product, but even back in it's primetime, it never seemed to gain a following, despite being, IMHO, far nicer to work with than MSVC. Was it just up against too much taking on Microsoft? or is there a reason why people don't like BCB?
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
I've expected this since Delphi for .NET was released.
It's too bad. Delphi's version of Pascal is a wonderfully simplistic yet capable language. If the compiler was more widely hosted, I'd pick it over C++ any day.
It's a little confusing when people talk about Kylix. Kylix use to only be an Object Pascal language. Delphi for Linux. However now it contains both Delphi and C++ Builder parts.
I suspect that even though it is the most exciting RAD tool to hit Linux EVER, it didn't have a big following.
The average Joe user has little use for a RAD tool and the average Linux developer for Linux uses C++. The Kdevelop project is pretty tough competition in that area.
Object Pascal hasn't really caught on yet but when it does, one has to wonder if there will be a bid demand for Kylix or Lazarus project.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
The PostgreSQL drivers and IDE updates I figured I had coming when I bought Kylix 1 Desktop Developer never came. Requests for information were always met in their newsgroups with vagueness, subterfuge, or condescension. The old Borland which I remember from the Turbo Pascal days is long gone, apparently.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Linux is NOT about commercial software. It is about free software. Companies trying to make money from Linux apps will always fail because Linux is about freedom of human knowledge NOT about profit of same.
I've just got to say it: Duh....
--
Before you ask more questions, think about whether you really want to
know the answers.
-- Gene Wolfe, "The Claw of the Conciliator"
and found it to be a very reliable, fast, and decently-supported IDE that produced apps that ran well when compared to other binary compilers. When D1 came out, it was a truly OO environment that left VB in the dust. It supported the Windows API better than VB did. Until MS got forms into their non-VB products, Deplhi was by far the fastest way to prototype or build a real Windows EXE that did something useful and performed respectably. It was this excellence that got Delphi any market share in the first place, it it was/is supported by lots of third-party vendors, and it had a loyal following of developers, not just here, it was very popular in Europe also. Kylix has unfortunately been a complete disappointment from this perspective. I believe it's not catching on because it does not work. Read the Borland Kylix IDE newsgroups. Nothing but install problems, lib incompatibilities, and kernel upgrades required to even install the thing. And even if you win that battle on some distro, there's the larger war of getting an app working with all the component/gui problems, and finally the disaster of deployment. What more do you need to discourage developers? Where you like Pascal or not, if Borland had created a reasonably functional product, that provided the same level of qualtiy that Delphi has done, existing Delphi developers would have been comfortable moving over to Linux, and others would have learned it, like they learned it for Windows when Delphi was hot. And corporate IT might buy into it because it would be a company-supported product on Linux. It's the great product that creates the demaind, not the free product. Linux is successful not so much because it is free, but because it works.
People didn't buy Kylix so the're dropping it, big deal it was never that good to start with. Use C++BuilderX which can cross compile to Windows, Linux x86 and Solaris x86. Kylix was never as good as Delphi and I for one would rather use C++ with VCL objects.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I started using it right about the time that geramik came along. I finally had some unity in application appearence. After using Kylix for a while I came to the realisation that anything I wrote with it would not only look out of place among everything else on my system, but in my opinion at least - look pretty ugly. I had a program I was working on in Kylix up when a friend came over, and the first thing she said after walking by the computer was "Hey! That looks like a Windows 3.1 program!". Perhaps they've changed this behavior since then, but since finding WxWindows I havn't had any motivation to check back.
Everything will be taken away from you.
In addition using CLX means you've got to distribute DLLs with the app. Until now we've managed to avoid this. Something you don't often hear about but in our eyes a major advantage of Delphi is that for many apps the EXE is all you need - no DLL hell for support staff to worry about.
Price wasn't an issue for us: Kylix 3 came free with our copy of Delphi 7.
while (*dst++ = *src++ ) ;
God almighty, it was boring, and when it was all over I realized I'd been had.
I've been using Delphi since one of the beta versions of Delphi 1.0 (when they were still considering calling it AppBuilder). I've developed in Java for a number of years, and recently have been doing a little Delphi work.
AFAIC Delphi is a great product. As said before, the only problems with it were: It's not Microsoft. It's not C++. And it's not VB. I've worked on government tenders that had a 3rd party company endorse our design and product recommendations. Then the customer's IT department ignored the product recommendation for using Delphi and Oracle and demanded it was done in VB and SQL Server. Why? Because they were products they knew (even though VB apps caused most of their support problems).
Delphi is a great product for producing gui and database apps. The language has a lot of power and flexibility. Kylix was designed to produce similar apps on Linux, but nobody wants them. Linux is a server OS, not a desktop OS. So customers want server applications, not gui applications. I've also written server-side stuff in Delphi (using Corba), and from that experience it's not suited to that sort of work either.
And since Kylix hasn't been as extensively used as Delphi, it also hasn't been as extensively tested. That's why the compatibility isn't there and the stability isn't there.
In summary, I think there are three reasons for the non-take up of Kylix. Price, stability and suitability. Personally, I'd like to see them do what they did with Interbase. But I doubt they'll do that.
To know that you know what you know, and that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom. --Scooby Doo
It ticks me off when people complain that Linux is slow because running something on RedHat8 or 9 is slow
1. redhat is only one of the distributions of linux
2. In order to support large user base they have to enable support for everything that linux kernel has to offer, thus making it extremely slow and unresponsive.
recompile 2.6-test8 (i'm using that haven't tried test9 yet) you'll see your system speed up almost 10 times!
When I was using 2.4 (custom compiled) +debian things were ok, however the system (shitty dell box 900mhz celleron ) was noticebly slow when I was apt-get upgrading (installing new version of software) and listening to music, sometimes the music became choppy..
When I upgraded to 2.6 I was apt-get ugpgrading listening to music , had many mozillas open + 6 other things i could not notice that I was running more than one application!!!
try 2.6 (only issue I have is that soundblaster doesn't support >2 channels now ???? )
~omi
I just thought I'd link some pictures of what I've been up to latly.
Here is one, as you can see me and CowboyNeel have been having lots of fun. By the way, its not by bird.
That was good. Mega Tokyo is fucking gay.
How is this modded only 1? It has all the reasons from a person living on the front.
Client GUI development is increasingly web-centric, and in the web server-side arena Delphi can't compete with the best languages out there (Lisp, Ruby, Python, Perl, Java).
Plus, Kylix was expensive.
Finally, Borland is Microsoft's whore these days--for Borland, it's .NET all the way (Delphi 8 only produces code for the .NET virtual machine). The last thing Microsoft wants on Linux is an IDE that brings Visual Basic-like simplicity to thick client development.
You got me.
In Julian Smart's recent announcement of the wxwindows foundation, he noted that Borland is supporting wxwindows development and that an employee of Borland is on the Board of Directors at the foundation. This is probably behind Borland's 'neglect' of kylix--expect the next generation to support wxWindows. This doesn't sound like abandonment to me.
I've actually done quite a bit of work with Kylix and for what I'm using it for it's wonderful.
I'm working on a MMPORPG, mostly working in Delphi and OpenGL, but the server runs on Linux. The complex data structure libary that represnes the Player's Data was written in Delphi and when moved over to Kylix to build the server it compiled without needed a single line of code.
I also used it to write a Apache Runtime Module so I could link the same data structure, account information, etc. inside Apache without needing to make Database calls in another language. Check it out for yourself @ www.vq-2.com
I've even have the OpenGL engine (not yet released) working just fine without requiring too many changes.
I'd hate to see Kylix go. Maybe they just need something high quality/profile written in Delphi ported via Kylix to show people the real power. Or, maybe they were hoping they could catch the "Linux on the Desktop" wave and make some quick cash on developers wanting to move aps to Linux.
Borland "Object Pascal" isn't standard Pascal.
It suffers from few of the restrictions of the standard language, and has many enhancements (e.g., properties) that are better than their C++ equivalents, IMO.
Also, it compiles faster than C++, and the IDE is just great.
It has its problems though, (every language does), but, all in all, I think that it compares favorably against C++ in many ways (and, of course, unfavorably in others).
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
when it first came out.
Incomplete, db connection thread die-offs, Borland's refusal to admit obvious, documented bugs.... fixes appeared in version 2, months later. I downloaded version 3 and noticed things hadn't improved, they got worse. Version 3 wouldn't run on my box.
All the usual problems with proprietary software.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
At the same conference, Borland previewed their upcoming Delphi for .NET IDE. Given Borland's track record, I'd bet that they've involved the Mono people in their .NET endeavors, even if only informally. Could Delphi for .NET + Mono be the "new kylix?" If Mono turns out as good as it could, we could finally have a REAL cross-platform Delphi.
Borland is and has been a fairly astute company for a number of years. Not a market leader, but a survivor never the less and to some extent an innovator.
They were lured by the candy of OpenSource and Linux and tried to explore a new market. That's a sound business move. When they became involved with the communities they realized that there was a conflict of values and direction. Something many companies have realized before.
Not that Linux or OpenSource are counter to capitalism by any abuse of imagination. However, they were planning to release a product that was, not free, not OpenSource, not standards based (to a point), and is primarily used for rapid development of closed source proprietary applications by a small number of developers per project.
Most OSS projects are neither rapid nor based on proprietary systems. Their primary market competition would have had every advantage of their product and none of the disadvantages.
We'll take Python as it's most apt competition (I do so because Java is in a different mind set as far as rapid development goes. Also I just don't like Java, and I'm writing so you can just bugger off), Python is a prime example of a mature system (Check into that. Just because you JUST heard about it doesn't make it new) with a proven background that provides highly rapid development, a margin over even Delphi. As well as a massive set of well developed tools for most platforms.
Not only is Python for Windows (like Delphi) it's for Linux and does everything that Kylix could (except cost you money). It also does MORE, in fact it does just about everything including running on everything from PopCans (SODA 1.5 and up) to Origin2000s (Just ask NASA). Python would have been stiff competition now take that competition and multiply it by a hostile community (because of Delphi's values and objectives in the Kylix project) and then take that and add the same factors when applied to Perl, C/C++, Ruby and about a half dozen other projects and you can see a wise financial decision emerging.
-RUN (quietly)-
You can't compete with passion by paying people.
You can't produce a better product by making an inferior one and charging more.
That's life.
Don't be upset with Borland, cheer them on for doing what's smart rather than popular with investors. Investors love Linux cause it's a buzzword their 18 year old sons throw around. It reminds them of the good ol' days of dot com startups.
If they want to get in bed with the movement then they need to work with what's already in place and firmly established not undermine it. They need to develop LOW COST if not free solutions for working with a variety of languages. Provid accessories and packages to make the already existing solutions work better. That's where the innovation is, not in fighting better products but making them even better, ride em' to the top. If they did that they would be helping us all especially themselves. By furthering the cause they would be increasing their user base and loyalty without expending a lot of money and reducing Microsoft's which would be good for them because MS makes many competing products, Be constructive not confrontational and build a community that loaths your competition,
ask Apple it works quite well.
Everybody who has purchased a commercial software product for Linux, please raise your hand.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
Kylix is (was?) a pretty decent app, but I have a feeling that even a great developer's app won't make an average UNIX developer much more productive vs. using plain old emacs. Things are very different in MS Windows programming world where I see a serious API bloat, and it would be very frustrating to get around without things like AutoComplete, ClassView and context-sensitive help. They would come in handy in UNIX app but they won't be nearly as useful.
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
Borland sucks. They don't stand behind many of their products. Just ask Borland Prolog users. ;)
Some products just dont sell, people dont like them enough to keep them afloat. I think its rediculous to whine about delphi on linux when it doesnt seem to make any real waves on windows either? Is it popular anywhere? Basically delphi seems to exist in places where one or more influential individuals had a soft-spot for it where the C#'s, C/C++'s and Java's of the world seem to fill niches which drive their use. Time to let it go.
I ended up using Kylix instead of PERL scripts to write some web access to database stuff. Works GREAT.
It took a lot less time to debug than the PERL stuff, because the D/K debugger in its inferior WINE state still is far better than most of what is out there.
Sooner or later there will be some sort of Pascal like compiler for Linux, Kylix is just proof that half measures avail you none. Borland will have to take it all the way for it to go at all.
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
It didn't sell because none of you assholes are willing to pay for anything. Not software, not music, not movies, not food, not anyting.
You can all go fuck yourselves. I'm going back to work WHERE THEY PAY ME SO I CAN EAT!
Fuckheads.
A Borland representative (doing a lousy marketing-oriented presentation of a number of uninteresting things) admitted that Kylix is "being faded out". Apparently the C++ Builder (or something, correct me if I'm wrong - but then again you'll do that even without my asking) has a Linux version that can, as an alternative, even use gcc as its compiler. That's what's supposed to be Borland's Linux alternative in the future.
He didn't admit it, but I got the impression that Kyix is being dumped because of bad sales. I think he used the words "Kylix is in an awkward position because of C++ Builder". On what it means, your guess is as good as mine.
Why does the kernel go through stable and then unstable forks? Can't it always be a stable build, like with Windows?
Well, two words:
Delphi sucks.
Don't wanna come off as a troll, but I used it and I looked at the code it produces, and basically, it's just not good.
Granted, it probably is easier to handle than your average c/c++ compiler, and it probably has an easy to use GUI, and that all might work perfectly for programmers in windows, but are WE really the sort of people who use stuff like that?
We have all these great, completely free tools, like gcc, gmake, yacc, bison, vi, emacs, kdevelop etc pp. Why would anyone want to use Kylix? I think it was a stillborn project, porting Delphi to linux. We're just not that sort of people...
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
A lot of people have gone on about why use Kylix when other compilers are free, Kylix is crap, etc. etc. etc.
.Net and have been for some time now. The next version of Delphi is for .Net, Borland has also released a C# compiler, and they are also trying to produce an IDE to comete with Visual Studio.Net.
The reason Borland is dropping Kylix is very simple: they are pushing
Microsoft is a big investor in Borland. Linux (via their Kylix sales) contributes *nothing* to their bottom line. Borland is a business, not a charity. They see no money in producing software for Linux.
1) Porting from Delphi to Kylix is hard. .net version.
Because Delphi developers usually use some Windows native methods and/or proprietary components.
2) Delphi world is waiting for a good
After that, it'll be possible to run Delphi applications using mono without recompiling and other hard work.
"Does this say something about the application or about the difficulties of marketing a commercial Linux application?"
First of those, I believe.
If there already are GTK and QT, why anyone would want to pull in another "GUI platform" without any historical roots in Linux, coming from alien environment?
I very much like Delphi and use it a lot, but I would really appreciate Borland making RAD tool set based on GTK or QT, instead of trying to mechanically bring over their Windows-oriented toolkit.
It just does not work. It is not serios...
I thought Linux was this 'free' OS ...
... If that's true ... Why develop anything commercially for it? Where's the money? Doesn't everyone using it expect everything to be 'open source' and 'free'? Almost Educational?
Linus is the leader of the 'free' world and all
Later,
-- Duder
Um, I bought both v2 and v3 for $249.00 each.
For a commercial RAD GUI development tool for Linux, I found the price quite reasonable. Particularly when they also release a version for free for those looking to GPL application development.
I, for one, will be very disappointed if they abandon this product. I use it on a nearly daily basis for system and web application development. I currently have a commercial firewall application that contains roughly 20,000 lines of Kylix code. In addition, my web billing system, customer management, and most of the background database tasks that run on my servers have been written in Kylix.
Anyone that goes on about Delphi not begin a real programming language has never actually learned to use it. I personally work with C, C++, Delphi, Perl, and Visual Basic... Delphi is by far the most productive language for database, web/cgi, and general utility work I have used. Granted, it would not be good to write a kernel or a 3D game, but that is not what I use it for.
5 years ago, I used the Borland compiler in college, and it was great. For the last three years, I've used only Free Software, and it's great. But this year I've returned to college, and I'm faced with the Borland compiler again, and it SUCKS!
So what changed? I accepted what I got back then. Now I expect:
- to use my editor of choice, and still have access to docs & tools
- the compiler to come with *all* useful docs, not just docs specific to the extra-money extension parts of the compiler.
- to use the same documentation system for all apps, and not have to relearn the borland help system
- my other apps to interoperate with the compiler.
- etc.
A copy of the source code would be no good to me, I wouldn't have time to make any changes. The important thing is that everyone should have access to the source code (and permission to change & redistribute it). When a package is Free Software, it must be as usable as possible, or someone will fork it. GNU/Linux users are treated too well to accept what Borland are offering, for $1000 or even for $0.Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Borland support was always claming "its only certified to run on rh7.2" and got really cagey about a fix or info on making it work on anything but RH 7.2.
Several e-mails to David Intersimone (the VP of developer relations at Borland) went unacknowledged and unanswered when I asked about the status of kylix. Even if I had gotten a "we dont have a fix, but we are working on it" kind of response to let me know they werent flatlined I would have kept at it.
I finally just had to give up and tell my customer we couldnt do a linux port in the time frame they wanted. That was certainly a day I had to bite down on the pillow that I would have liked to have avoided...
The Delphi product is great, the JBuilder product is great, the C# builder is great, why did they make linux the red-headed stepchild?
That's easy: there is lots of competition in the IDE market. Why would people buy Kylix if they can get so many IDEs for free?
Furthermore, it's Qt-based and Qt isn't doing so well: IBM, Sun, RedHat, and other major players are putting most of their efforts into Gtk+.
I second this.
Delphi is simply the best development environment for 99% of Windows tasks.
Kylix could be really good if they would fix the bugs in it.
It takes enormous time to figure out and circumvent the problems in it.
Used it for some cool server apps, Apache modules, etc.
But those bugs in the proprietary code... not fixed since years...
because there is python
Borland has alwas be "pro-windows", you can see this by the still lot of support they provide to Delphi, and other Windows dev environment, despite the very little money they get from there !
....
... and to prevent loss they might cut some product, andunfortunatly for Linux, Kylix may be one of this !
:(
Instead of investing money in new platform tools, such as JBuilder (fyi, with this tool BORL used to get more than 70% of its money, with only 30% of investment), or Kylix (this tool has always suffer from comparaison to his window counterpart, plus if you need real X-platform then JBuilder was already there),
But now they got a problem, because of their lack of investment in many domains JBuilder is no more the reference for Java IDE's, as Eclipse or IDEA IntelliJ are providing a much better user experience.
With lots of redundat tools because of the merger with various providers, they have a big work to do to make their solution offer consistent.
Meanwhile, market shares are decreasing
IMHO, we could not even think they will OSed the tool after discontinuation, as it is a contender for 2 of their home tool. By releasing such a tool for free, they will shoot again in their foot
I, for one, will be very disappointed if they abandon this product
Damn. I thought this was going to say 'I, for one, welcome our new product-abandoning overlords.'
I've been spending *way* too much time here.
There is an Open Source Delphi Clone Project, called Lazarus, been on the way for some years, and actually getting quit usable (the linux version is, the windows port has some major glitches still).
.Net only focussing, which will actually bind Delphi Developers to MS only platforms.
Linus Torvalds in a recent interview said that VisualBasic was the Windows Killer Application, I think Lazarus will be the same for Open Source Development. It's Open Source, it will be crossplatform, even for Macs (everybody wanted Delphi for Macs), and it brings the skills of Delphi Developers (of which there are quit a few) and all the existing libraries to ALL Platforms
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org
http://lazarus-ccr.sourceforge.net
I've been and still am a Fan of Delphi, but I dont agree with Borland on their
Open cross-platoform Object Pascal, Delphi compatible, still beta, but really worth investigating.
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org
http://lazarus-ccr.sourceforge.net
It's a shame about Kylix. Fortunately there's an open source alternative.
The Lazarus IDE has made a lot of progress over the last year. It's built on the cross platform and self contained Free Pascal Compiler... so all a Lazarus app needs to install and run is GTK and a Linux kernel with elf support. This makes writing and packaging trans-distro apps a relatively easy process. Lazarus and FPC can currently produce full featured graphical apps on Linux and FreeBSD. A The Win32 version is also progressing nicely, for those who are interested.
The Lazarus IDE and Free Pascal Compiler are written in Object Pascal and compile themselves. The latest RPM's and source tarballs can be found at http://lazarus-ccr.sourceforge.net.
The top three activies on home desktops are email, WEB surfing and games. While LINUX may have two of three covered (no I don't count WineX to be ideal) and RedHat's own CEO saying LINUX was not ready for prime time on the desktop, why is this a surprise? Kylix harkens back to the days of "resource editors" starting with NeXTStep's GUI builder in the 1980's that allowed you prototype applications. Everyone was like "Wow!" But in hindsight it let's be real, it was nothing more than prototyping dialog boxes. Big deal. It seemed like a big deal and was reinforced on the Windows side with the release of "QuickC for Windows." It also brought the idea of "drawing" dialog forms into a popular environment under Windows. A couple of commercial products had been offering developers that choice already (not surprisingly after QuickC their market disappeared). Eventually IDEs encompassed more and more functionality. But applications being created today have little relation. The days of lots of developed of form based applications using something OTHER than a WEB browser are LOOOOONG gone. Most applications today are either web applications or the customization of ERP, CRM packages. Kylix is as an "important IDE" is an anachronistic notion since while IDEs are great for generating boilerplate projects are not critical to getting work done. IDEs don't have the relevance that they once did, Kylix is pretty irrelevant to the kind of development going on under LINUX - LINUX's forte is server side deployments. Add to that the programming language of Kylix is Object Pascal and I see yet another strike against it. While *NIX types tend to be very open to alternative programming languages I don't see a cogent case for using Object Pascal. In terms of semantics it offers no greater expressive power than let's say C++. Yeah sure I remember my days with Turbo Pascal fondly but I don't see much relevance. And lastly there's the mess that are X desktops - a lack of common controls and no consistent look and feel. This means great difficulty in achieving an "integrated" feel with the very disparate environments. This may not be a big deal to most people on Slashdot but it is for businesses training non-technical users with custom applications. And since RedHat just canned its desktop LINUX, Kylix can't ride those coattails. Probably the biggest in terms of having a crack at success. All of these factors add up to Kylix being an evolutionary dead end IMHO.
I was working with a CBT Vendor last year (before they went belly up) and had the lucky chance of sharing the office with a IT Expert with 25 years of expierience. He had a little clue about what was going on in the OSS field, but mainly was into Delphi, due to his Pascal history. He therefore also was a big borland fan.
.Net IDEs are supposed to be the hottest thing since wrapped hankeys (so I've heard), is having a hard time getting back the developers once they've met with the Linux enviroment. How then should a buggy Kylix do the trick?
I infused him with SuSE Linux, Python, Zope and Netbeans/Java/JBoss... you name it, and half a year later he was, of course, way ahead of me in the free PL/IDE field. Afaik he enver looked bach on Delphi and he didn't even think about trying Kylix.
IMHO Kylix could have only become relevant if they'd done a more open approach right from the start. With free IDEs for all GPL projects, an open spec for the Delphi/Pascal language and a rock-solid support for the OSS community.
As far as I can remember there is only 2 OSS projects in Kylix right now. Now way is that gonna make up for some recognition in the developers community. Hell, even Micros~1, whose
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Kylix, like the NVidia drivers, will run best on a particular release of Red hat. It takes effort to make Kylix run on anything else and it is next to impossible to make it generate binaries which run on more than one platform. That is one reason why it did not see widespread adoption: it's just too darn hard to make it generate useful software for more than one platform.
My first IDE was Borland on DOS. It was good then and Micro$oft's was a buggy piece of garbage. Over the years, Micro$oft got better and Borland got hacked and patched and got worse until it couldn't compile anything without fiddling with it first. I FINALLY switched to Visual Studio, about a year or two before Borland died. Then Micro$oft had no competition so VisualStudio got hacked and patched and got worse until it couldn't compile anything without fiddling with it, so I climed off the upgrade tredmill and switched to Linux. I missed having an IDE, so when Borland was "reborn" and announced Kylix. I wasted no time in downloading it and trying it out. It was the same hacked and patched piece of crap that I had abandoned on Windows and it still couldn't compile anything without fiddling with it. Sorry Borland I am not going to shell out $1000 so that you can realize that it's still a piece of Crap a year or two later and leave me holding the bag. If they ever wrote a Good IDE that made me feel it had a reason to live, I might buy it Maybe they should go look for the source for the old DOS one that was so good so many years ago, and start their port from it.
..." He switches it on, and I Love Loosley is on... He switches it off and says "..yup, that's what I saw."
Actually it reminds me of the line from Crocodile Dundee when he sees a TV set and says something like "Oh yea, I saw one of these in a storefront in Sydney once
Sorry Borland... maybe you should merge with Greenhills Software, and release a new version of "Multi 2004" Between both programs, maybe you could compile BOTH halves of the program.
Because noone shells out that kind of money for something that's arguably the _least_ mature Linux development environment. I've done lots of Delphi development and love it - elegant language, good extensions, garbage collection, nice IDE, good 3rd party components. A shame the MS tools have an unfair advantage, but that's how it goes.
I had great hope and expectations when Kylix was announced, and the good fortune to get Kylix 3 with my Delphi 7 package. But that didn't go very far. Delphi is a mature and feature-rich environment while Kylix feels dummied-down. Partly because the CLX is a subset of VCL, partly because hardly any 3rd party components exist, and partly because it's closed - that doesn't go down well on Linux. Kylix has a huge uphill battle to win - against tools that are FREE (GPL), are being developed rapidly, and have large communities around them. Alternatives like KDevelop and Qt Designer are hard to beat on their home turf - and an order of magnitude harder, the gcc.
Kylix is dependent on a revenue stream to afford future improvements, while the competition does fine without, and you start fearing that Kylix might not be around for long - another reason to stay away until it's proven itself. A chicken-egg circle.
Does this say something about the application or about the difficulties of marketing a commercial Linux application?"
Well, both. They've entered the market late with an overpriced and immature product. That's the application side of it.
The other side is that competing with mature GPL'ed products is very difficult. You're not going to win over many of the existing Linux developers, they'd have to rely on hordes of Windows people moving. That just didn't happen.
Kylix was a neat concept, but closed source development tools are (IMO) a dead end on Linux. I'm headed off to learn Qt.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
to the original Kylix 1.0 or it's 2.0 version because I couldn't change the email address on my user account - you know that email addy that they send the key to. Nobody at Borland would listen and/or reply via email or whatever. I even tried sending email to the admin of the website and asking that the request be forwarded to the proper channels.
I got disgusted and abandoned my attempts. I used to be a very happy user of Delphi at one time and was looking forward to a Kylix experience that never materialized.
Disappointing...
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Borland should open Kylix. It should be possible to make source open, but sell license to produce not-GPL software. Just like with MySQL. I see just no market for closed source Kylix.
He's the one that controls limbo (anagram of Mobile). He works for the Merovingian, though, so you may end up having to speak with him.
I see a lot of misconceptions posted here, so I'll just put some light on:
1. Kylix is not the same as Delphi for Linux: Delphi uses the VCL, Kylix uses CLX. VCL is much more evolved and tested.
2. Delphi/Kylix uses Object Pascal, which is not the same as the plain Pascal you know. Compiling in Delphi is *much* faster than in C/C++. The language is great and rich in features. Pascal may suck, but Object Pascal doesn't.
3. Kylix didn't sell? Of course, not as much as Delphi. The reason? The Linux market is not asking for desktop applications (the best use for Delphi, IMO). In my personal experience, 3 out of 5000 costumers asked for a Linux version of our software. When Kylix was announced, I was thrilled, mainly because I would be "Microsoft-free". But in my real world, it just didn't happen. My costumers are using Windows, and it's for Windows I'll develop.
Back when I was a Windows guy, I was excited about Kylix because I was starting to be interested in Linux, and now it finally had a popular IDE.
After I got into Linux and used GCC some, I vowed never to touch an IDE again. It's just easier to work without the clunkiness of a gui.
"Software is like sex; it's better when it's free." -Linus Torvalds
I went to a Borland Prolog Users Group convention.
It was being held at the Towers of Hanoi.
I hope this applies to the original Kylix, which was all Delphi, and not the Kylix3 product, which added C++ support. The problem with Kylix3 is that the Borland C++ ABI is incompatible with gcc. As well there were some operational issues with the IDE that were related to the threading through the Linux kernel. This made it difficult to run the product on newer kernels. Now that ISO has issued a C++ standard, I was rather hoping that Borland would eliminate these previous shortcomings. Kylix3 is a really a great product.
Just got back from BorCon, myself...
Odds of Kylix being resurrected are quite small.
C++Builder X, hosted in a Java-based IDE (so that it can run on a number of back-ends) is set up to integrate with a goodly native back-end compilers and debuggers. The demonstration they had debugging ARM code running on an actual mobile device over Bluetooth was fairly impressive.
C++Builder X can target gcc on Linux, which addresses the needs (from what I could tell) of a lot of Borland's complainants. There's a modicum of an IDE for designing things for wxWindows as well, which can target the multiple platforms quite well, including mobile.
Borland is really working their buns off trying to get Delphi 8 for .NET ready and working. It will be using the new Galileo interface (the same one C#Builder uses), and includes a number of language additions (including attributes, like [Serialize] and [WebMethod], operator overloading, value types), a purportedly much smoother means of porting VCL apps, and compiles straight into IL as well.
Rumor has it that a Win32 version might be in the works to come out 6 months - 1 year afterwards, including the majority of the language improvements (anything that doesn't require a garbage collector).
They would need to finish that Win32 stage before even thinking about another Kylix.
There's also the possibility that someone will make a .NET host properly on the Linux platform, with proper hooks into the visual systems as well. That would likely be a more tempting target for a next-gen Kylix (if ever) than trying to tie directly to Qt again.
Kylix was too soon; its best target market would be enterprise desktop computing, and Linux isn't there in force yet. I aired my prediction at the conference that SCO's blundering and the resultant backlash from abroad and from a much more organized and militant group of Linuxites will see an invasion of Desktop Linux over the next couple of years, but nobody seemed to believe me :) Time will tell.
From the sounds of it, Kylix wasn't a "waste" in terms of experience - Borland now knows how to do a port better; the .NET one likely would have gone awry without Linux as a testbed.
For my own purposes, Kylix was invaluable for preparing my code for portability. I'll be targetting Win32, .NET and Linux from a single codebase (most of my code is classes, not RAD, so CLX troubles don't affect me much).
Be interesting to see how Lazarus shapes up, too. Getting a new machine at work - it's a Windows shop, but here's a chance for a Linux install at last :)
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
I was interested in the idea of Kylix (I've used C++ Builder) but never got past the price. Builder was a wonderful idea (works pretty much the same as Windows Forms) that was held back by bugginess, quirky unportability, and incidentals like the absolute worst text editor I've ever seen on any platform. The usual story in the shareware business is that Linux is a useless platform to target, since everyone thinks they shouldn't have to pay and expects to get source code. Wrong! I like the idea of Open Source, but I have to eat and don't have tenure anywhere, tax free status, or many offers to speak. When is someone going to worry about my rights, as opposed to my users? If Kylix had panned out, I might have tried doing some Linux ports anyway, but the combination of extreme price, fair to poor experience w/ Borland, and no prospect of Mac development (which makes about as much money as Windows products, all things considered) killed that deal.
Thats an easy question. Because things that suck don't usually sell to well. Kylix, Calderda Linux, NGauge, etc.
We tried to use Kylix 3 to do some web apps. It sucked big time. Many many bugs. Lots of things not supported on Linux (e.g. only CGI apps would work on linux).
It was very easy to develop GUI apps though.
But the bugs and the crashing (it would use Wine and what a piece of crap that is, I'd have 30 Wine instances running after a couiple of hours running Kylix as it would crash constantly) made it totally useless.
Plus all the examples were for Delphi language, as were all the docs. You had to do a lot of guessing to do things in C++.
Heres my sugestions as to why this is happening.
.NET bullshit. I will NOT be buying the next version of Delphi becuase of this. I belive this is also the main reason why they are talking about scraping the Linux version. Its obvious that .NET isn't avaiable for Linux, so they would have to create wrappers and use buble gum to hold it together.
- I think it was poor marketing, they should have stuck with the delphi name. Many people have no idea what Kylix is.
- Applications don't port as well as you would hope. I wrote a fairly large application in Delphi, many becuase my Linux workstation was dead for a while. (Hardware failure) When I got my workstation back up and running, it took well over 3 weeks to port it. The forms where screawed up, and there was a slew of components that where avaiable in Kylix. TLabelEdit is a good example.
- Applications written or complied in Kylix where laggy compaired to the Windows version. They don't run as well.
- Path issues. When you write an application in Kylix, you have to have a small shell script just to load your application. It makes things more of a pain in the ass. Its something that was never fixed since Kylix 1.0 (I own all versions of Kylix)
- The IDE responded different at times then Delphi. Which made development a pain at times.
- Font support sucks in Kylix.
- Bugs wheren't getting fixed along with Delphi. Kylix users had to wait months before it was updated.
- BDE isn't avaiable for Linux. Sure, its not as good as dbExpress, but made porting old applications a pain.
- Price vs what you get. The enterprise version is $2000. That gives you ALL the tools. Sorry, but I am doing this on the side from my normal job. I can't afford to drop $2000 on a development platform. The professional version is $500, which is cutting it close. Anything more, and I wouldn't buy it.
- It was never designed from the ground up to work multiplatform. (Well, dual platform, Windows and Linux was all they supported) This is why a number of these issues exist.
- Delphi is moving towards
All in all, its sad to see. The Linux development market is very hard. Its even harder for client applications then server side stuff. Companys are generally using Linux more for there servers then workstations.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Grandparent poster must be from the Department of Redundancy Department ;)
When Borland released C++ 4.5 they lost most of their developers right there. The quality has been down hill. And most developers know, you can't afford crap tools.
Borland marketed this application specifically to people looking to port delphi applications to linux. There aren't that many out there. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is zMud. (Side rant: He put in a faq for awhile that he would port it to linux but couldn't because delphi didn't have a linux port. Then they came out with a linux port, and now he's made more excuses. Not that linux is any poorer for it. His applications are bloated inefficient monstrosities.) I find it hard to perceive a way that with a small target market to begin with (windows delph developers, porting to linux) that they expected to sell tons of this.
Of course, you /could/ use it to develop applications for linux from scratch, but now you're trying to compete with what, a 90% installed base of C or C++ applications on linux?
A quick look at freshmeat reveals over 8,000 projects written in C or C++, and less than 100 written in pascal and delphi combined. Linux developers looking to do quick development are probably far more likely to go perl/python/java than delphi, particularly if they want their application to run on more than just linux and windows.
And then of course there's the pricing model. And the way they split out the features. Yeesh. Talk about trying to kill a product's success. IIRC, you don't even get database objects with the free developers version. Borland makes great products, but they suck at marketing them.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
You know perl, but think that delphi is more productive for web/cgi. What you smoking?
That was the end of Borland. That product stank, and it was obvious that the Borland C++ compiler line was near its end.
So we switched to Visual C++ 5.0.
That was when I was forced to abandon years of OWL prgramming skills and learn MFC. It wasn't a hard transition, but it still pissed me off.
I can only speak for myself but I will never use a Borland product again.
M$ may bite, but atleast they have a lifespan.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Many speculate this is a politically correct way of saying the project has been abandoned.
:)
Okay, who exactly do you think is going to be insulted by this? Gays? Women? Religious Folks? Or is "politically correct" just easier to spell than "euphemism"?
Borland always struck me as the Corel of the Windows development world shot with a bizaro-ray, although over the past few years they have really become much more solid. While I think highly of their tools, I never believed that they believed in Linux.
When they briefly entertained being acquired by Microsoft nine or so months ago, I completely wrote them off. I didn't want to invest in a company that actually desired to be absorbed by Microsoft only to leave my Linux development tools to become Microsoft Abandonware.
Between the time of switching platforms, I also discovered a host of tools that served my needs and that were also open source. I bet a lot of other developers went down a similar path.
Well, that's my bit...
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
We do a lot of work with Delphi. We are accustomed to the prices of their "Pro" editions, and they've always done what we needed to do... "Enterprise" was a waste of money for us. Now, though, to do the same development work under Linux as we do in Windows, the cost would be doubled, JUST because we're developing database applications for a web site, instead of a Win32 desktop.
So, we'll continue to use Delphi for Windows work, and PHP for Linux/apache. It's worked well. Kylix became a non-issue, because essential-to-us features were picked by some marketing type to be "Enterprise" level.
"There hasn't been any updates to Kylix 3.0 in well over a year."
You mean:
There HAVEN'T been any updates to Kylix 3.0 in well over a year.
Moron.
I think the title "Slashdot editor" should be changed to "Slashdot regurgitator" -- they seem to do very little actual editing.
.. Namely, the new Gideon coming out with KDE 3.2( KDevelop 3.0 ). It's by far the best IDE available on Linux IMO, closed OR open. You've got code-completion, integrated debugging, integrated leak checking, integrated CVS, and it all works like a snap. And if you're dveeloping KDE or QT apps with it, it integrates with QT designer so you have a visual UI editor as well. Also the new version has support for Java.
I tried Kylix before, and seriously, KDevelop royally kicks its arse. I don't know why anyone wanting a graphical linux IDE would use anything else.
Of course, there's always VI for the non-grpahical peeps.
There is no market for commercial Linux applications.
Delphi etc. tools are dumbed-down (that is not a bad thing!) to be appealing to the mass market developer.
The cutting edge stuff in Linux world happens on the server. On the desktop there are either very specialized projects (like some professional graphics software) or more or less hobby projects. Hobby projects are typically lead by people who are not afraid of C++ and can enjoy coding in Qt, WxWindows, etc.
There is no killer Linux desktop market / application that would justify the attention of run-of-the-mill programmer who would embrace Delphi -for-Linux tool.
I said it before - face the reality people. Instead of playing catch-up game with Windows and silently bleeding desktop users to Mac, Linux needs to find itself, needs to break thru into something so new and wonderful where the benefits of the platform would matter and the shortcomings of the platform would not.
The problem with Kylix is that it came long after the peak of Delphi's popularity (and also that it didn't support C++) and pretty much became abandonware before desktop Linux started becoming popular.
Too little, too late... and not for long enough to get adopted.
The biggest Kylix market is people who are existing Delphi-Windows developers who want to move to Linux... and this isn't a very large group.
The second biggest market is those who have already moved to Linux, but are having trouble deciding what set of GUI-builder tools to use, and how to use them. Do they use freely available tools, or pay a nice chunk of cash to use Kylix -- a barely supported product that only recently got out of beta testing, only to be left in limbo.
Borland gave up on Linux far too soon. If Kylix becomes complete abandonware, then Borland will miss the boat and lose their investment.
Linux on the desktop is still in its infancy in many ways. The best is yet to come.
Based on my cursory review of the newest release of C++Builder called C++BuilderX, it replaces the need for Kylix.
From their Tech Overview:
"The C++BuilderX IDE runs on Windows, Linux and Solaris and is designed to provide a consistent and unified interface across these platforms..."
So, they have not abandoned *NIX platforms, they have integrated it into their main C++ development product.
My $0.021. Take a look at blender, one for all
2. ~user (I mean users home)
3. Yes every distro has different button, I agree
4. They all support apt rpm and deb
5. Just yesterday I got fedora, funny thing it's already on all my 3 personal PCs, from 2-5AM (yes all my software and preferences along with mails address books, themes, my likes and dislikes, gimp1.3, scribus, sodipodi etc) and still have the same amount of money, now you do that in 3 hours, that time includes cd burning too, by the way all of the work was done on one machine, network install
6. WINE. Why would I need WIne, to run Outlook maybe? Yeah right on the day I burn in hell
7. Well NVidia, tvout, sblive and everything along with my wacom is working perfectly, compaq evo800v is working perfectly, one is older PC for testing purposes of new distro as a server (I still plan to deploy RH( as server for quite some time, upgrade to fedora is just too simple)
8. While Evolution looks better than any Outlook, and sound juicer is just too lovable to compare to any other ripping app. Mplayer is still far, far the best movie player ever, etc. I guess you get the point
9. I would never convince anybody to use Suse, hell even I don't like it. RH was the choice, but with fedora it has gone to way better distro (difference between speed and responsiveness under RH9 and fedora is uncomparable).
10. In Linux, there is a well based free quality, if product isn't good enough just like Kylix, that product just drops out of race being rolled over by free alternative
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
that's an easy one: because it's pascal for linux. and nobody is programming in pascal on linux, except for maybe the free pascal guys.
good to see someone in this thread knows what they are talking about! As far development halting on this product - so what, where I work they still use Delphi 3 for alot of work. I know moving to a later version would be a PITA, because I've done some work with Delphi 6 and some behaviour had changed (due to you Kylix buggers I believe :)
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
They couldn't have thought that it would seriously compete with vi, could they?
Why use a commercial RAD-tool on a system that virtually SCREAMS develop-me and hands out free tools to do so? Nobody needs kylix. (If you got the skills to develop in Linux, you're way past RAD-tools)
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Amen and it Will never be Killed by a corporation ... like borland/inprise/borland/ms .
Closed source apps are not worth time the installing
them and Kylix pure 100% closed sorce app
This why it died
They tried to kill firebird (remember interbase it was os-ed and now is closed again)
It's a dead product IMHO
developer http://flamerobin.org
This trait dates back to the 1980's, when Borland was founded. When Digital Research's GEM -- the first usable GUI for the PC -- came out, I offered to produce (and even prototyped!) a version of Turbo Pascal that worked with it. But Borland wouldn't go for it. (It later developed for the Mac -- a minuscule market -- and Windows, where competitor Microsoft held all the cards.) At the time, Philippe Kahn said that he didn't want to develop for GEM because it was a small market. To which I replied, "Of course; it's new! But with good development tools, you can make it a big market."
Philippe didn't listen, and got his butt kicked (and his developers stolen) by Microsoft.
More recently, responding to media hype, Borland leaped onto the Linux bandwagon with Kylix. This was another big mistake. Few Linux users will pay even a penny for development tools, and many are in fact ideologically opposed to doing so. I told Borland at the time that it should support BSD, which lacked the anti-business zealotry that's found in so much of the Linux and GPL communities, would pay for good compilers, and wanted non-GPLed tools But did Borland listen? Of course not -- their craven "me too" attitude once again caused them to make the wrong choice. Instead of promoting (and sharing) the success of a platform, they became a weak offering on one where they could not possibly make money.
Given this poor track record, I'm actually amazed that Borland is still in business at all.
There is only one problem with your Kylix related note.
Kylix in the first place was not targeted to already existing Linux developers but to Windows developers who want to develop/migrate/cross platform to Linux. Mostly Delphi guys at first, later C++ developers also.
And everyone knows that there are much more Windooze developers than Pingvinistas so the plan would have worked.
It could have worked if Borland would fix the problems and bugs found and reported in Kylix.
They did not do that for years and in result people did not buy Kylix (why would they buy a buggy unsupported development environment?).
Boy was I disappointed! First of all, when Kylix starts it opens a new project, instead of the last project opened. It was not easy to find a tree- or list-view of the files in the project, nor was it obvious how to add or remove files from the project permanently. When you try to save a project, Kylix uses some default project name, e.g. Unit1.something, rather than allowing you to specify a project name and options using a wizard at the time of project creation, as is the case with JBuilder.
Second, I found it impossible to get Kylix to use existing shared libraries I had written. Also, Kylix masks some X headers, XUtil.h I believe, making it impossible to use OpenGL. Of course, Kylix is designed for enterprise apps, not scientific apps, but it is still ridiculous that they would cripple the ability to use OpenGL and other libraries by masking some of the key X headers.
Overall I was extremely disappointed by Kylix. JBuilder is by far a superior product, as was C++ Builder. I have yet to find a product, open or proprietary, that makes scientific applications easy to build in a RAD/GUI fashion.
Before I get flamed for trying to write a scientific app with a product designed for building enterprise apps, let me point out that I attempted to build a database app in Kylix, only to fail. I built a similar app in JBuilder in only a few weeks.
This is just an aside from the Kylix fiasco...
(US$1000+ for a buggy IDE? Real smart!)
System requirements for the latest demo of C++BuilderX from Borland:
compact: 512MB/RAM, 300MB/disk
recommended: 768MB/RAM, 1.2GB
This also includes a version of Together, but still, doesn't it seem a bit much?
*snicker*
...
I'll bite:
There are better development tools already available on the platform Kylix targets
Oh, and to start a flamewar:
BorCon was the day all Delphi development stopped for day - all 2000 of the delphi community.
*snicker*
Borland has decided to support wxWindows. It does make any sence for them to create another widget set (aka Qt) or to try and build there own any more. Borland has always been about letting people have control. When everything went off 16 bit they still supported it for a number of years even after it went out of fasion. They tried to do the same with linux using Kylix with varing success.
About two months ago(or less) they started to officially support wxWindows. They're helping them to set up a foundation (aka mozilla foundation) so they can make sure people that they can protect the code.
From what I can see it's a win win situation. wxWindows get support in the form of better testing and an accelerated wxEmbeded toolkit (they always had good doco - well I thought they did) and Borland gets to make the best wxWindows RAD IDE around (there aren't any good WYSIWYG ones around at the moment)
It means that anything made with Kylix 5?(They'll probably rename it or atleast skip a version ^-^) Can be setup in a single build script to create three executables one for Linux, one for Windows and one for the Mac. You'll be able to bundle them all on one CD and sell your product to all off them using native widgets (including native drag and drop and cut and paste).
The code create will be largely wxWindows code although I suspect Borland will make there own libraries in area's that wxWindows doesn't cover or add complex widgets built on wxWindows. I suspect you'll still be able to compile it without borland though. ( Think Netbeans and java )
Anyway I personally think it's a better dirrection although we won't see anything for a year or so.
I tried Kylix 1 to 3, no way. If it would work like Delphi ( and I'm using D4 ) it would be a winner. Why Delphi, the speed of development - and not just on GUIs. Last month I did need a glue between new C# applications and our old C / C++ based systems - no GUI. After some tries to make the interfaces to interact, the memory management, multiple heaps, table locking ( memory databases - this is a fast switch ), etc. the only one to support old DLLs under C# without using any special tricks was Delphi - now the C# appications can use all the native features ( no unmanaged! ) because Delphi takes care of interfaces. Also - the Delphi comm. components are short and clean and can drop to low level when needed - try that on C# ( yet - the support is not yet there ). This is no small system - a wireless system with 5000+ users roaming GPRS / WAN / LAN with FIPs level security. Performance - excellent, no memory leaks ( maybe, only run one week yet.. ), persistent data ( very easy in Delphi ), and so on. All that said - this is a prototype and will be replaced with something else for several reasons, we can't find developers who know Delphi, comm., memory management, safe threading, etc. AND this will run on other platforms later on - so, with great pain this will be changed to C or ??. Can be done ( not even difficult now when we have a prototype ) but the estimated code space will 5-6 times of Delphi so it takes time to code and to test.
[most of it's components are a pain to try and extend.]
Indeed - most of the nicer third party controls (of which there are a great number) start "from scratch" rather than extend the corresponding built in control.
Only Camel Wide Lites...
Try developing a web administrator for an Embedded system in Perl... as most of my development work is done for embedded systems, interpreted languages are never an option.
Your post goes back to my original point about not having learned to use the language. If you have every used the TWebModule and PageProducers to create CGI apps, you might have a different view of Delphi as a CGI languange.
I currently have a web administrator written for my commericial product that consists of a 30k SSL enabled web server, a 60k Kylix CGI app, and about 50k of HTML and graphics... try coming up a system administrator utility in Perl for 140k of disk space - can't be done.
Brett you had the answer for them with GEM!!!! If they had done what you said Borland and not microsoft would be in control.
If you know all and see all in computing tell me how I can make ReactOS a better and more used system. Oh and dont bother telling me to relicense BSD/X11 because some of our developers are long gone and we cant change the license of there code.
Free Unix? Free Windows. http://www.reactos.com
Also, if you consider BC5.0 or its successor (oh that's right there was no successor of its C++ compiler line) then you are on weed.
Don't mention the C++ branded product that was built on top of Pascal please, or I will be force to bitch slap you.
There C++ tools ceased to exist, and lots of people were forced to migrate. Believe me, I didn't want to - but there was no choice.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Hello uradu,
Since you didn't get an answer about that, I think I'll point out that there's no 'real' compiler for Python -- they just package the interpreter and the bytecode together, as you supposed. Which is a good thing for deploying stuff on Windows, mind.
However, there -is- a JIT compiler for Python, which is called psycho, and it works really well (basically, just "import psycho" and then "psycho.full()" at the beginning of your program, and poof, it works). Some operations get speeded up drastically.
Also, if you're not targetting Windows primarily, you may want to try Qt 3 with PyQt. I found that you'll often need from 20% to 50% less code with Qt (thanks to its great API), and Qt Designer is a darn great GUI editor, too. You'll probably want to use the Eric IDE, which comes with the best Python debugger you'll find. (If you're targetting Windows as well, only Qt 2 is available there for free, and in some case it requires a tiny bit more code -- so if you've already invested some time learning wxPython it might not be worth switching.)
I've ended up dropping wxPython, personally, so I can't help you much with it, but if you need hints, help, etc, with Qt and PyQt, please feel free to drop me a line at balinares -at- ierne -dot- eu -dot- org.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.