Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Apple, meet Orange.
You're comparing a Win32 development tool to a Linux development tool. Now I'll pretend you know this, and debate it anyways-- with Visual Studio .NET Professional you don't just get one language, you get access to four. You get Visual C# .NET, Visual C++ .NET, Visual Basic .NET and Visual J# .NET. With Kylix all you get is Delphi (Pascal) and C++ (which I'm not entirely sure, but I think the backend uses gcc-- I may be wrong on this point though).. two languages vs. four languages in VS.
Of course the odd thing is, Kylix has an "open edition" that's free as in beer for GPL work, IIRC. It doesn't make sense that Linux developers wanting to try it out wouldn't try the OE version then pay for the retail version if they wanted to do commercial apps down the road.
Agreed, their IDE's have always been a winner with me, but their marketing skills leave loads to be desired. Just check out some of the prices at shop.borland.com vs. the prices list at shop.microsoft.com for examples of the travesty going on at Borland today. *shakes head*
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
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.
I've been a fan of Borland Delphi for many years now. After trying VB, MSVC++, and Delphi, I found Delphi the easiest to use. Its native code dependencies make it easy to deploy applications without worrying if the user is running the latest version of the MS C++ runtime libraries (MFC), and the ever growing library of natively written code makes it easy to deploy all kinds of applications. I do have one giant complaint about Borland, though. They make little effort to fix known and documented bugs in their software.
About three years ago, I found a bug in the implementation of the virtual list view. I filled out their online bug report, giving in excruciating detail an explanation of what the problem was, why I thought it was happening, and exactly what had to be done to reproduce it. Three days later, I got a response that the bug was verified as existing, had been cataloged, and would be fixed in the next update. That was in Delphi 5.0.2. Now, 3 years later, they're on Delphi 7, and the bug still hasn't been fixed. Talking to colleagues of mine, I have found other examples of the exact same pattern: Bug gets reported, bug acknowledged by Borland, bug never gets fixed.
Borland really needs to fix these kinds of problems, as they only lead to frustrations for programmers. If they're going to take the trouble to catalog and verify bugs, they really need to go one step further and fix them.