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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?"
GPL 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
> their marketing skills leave loads to be desired
I don't think the marketing and development departments at Borland have ever met. They've had some of the best developers over the years, yet especially in the last few years their marketing and PR was filled with arrogant know-it-alls. And the hordes of apologists for whom Borland could do no wrong don't help. Microsoft may have done VB first, but Borland did it right, yet ironically it's Microsoft reaping the benefits of much of that hard work at Borland.
I've been a huge fan of Delphi for years, but seeing Borland's attitude lately, and especially their PR double-speak and kowtowing to Microsoft, I think it's time to move on. They seem to be spending a lot more time dot-netting Delphi than evolving the langugage.
For native Win32 apps I still think Delphi is best, even in arrested development. But for cross-platform apps I'm very intrigued by Python and wxWindows (or wxPython). The apps seem to be truly portable, and wxWindows has such good binding to native widgets that you can create truly nice-looking and seamless GUIs. For most business-type applications I think it's a really viable option.
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 hacked it for about 5 months working on a cross-platform idea I had (2 months on K2, 3 on K3). The interface to QT was to shallow and they installed an older patched QT version to link statically. The C++ learning curve is smaller than the K3 bug stomping exercise. There were too many features that you just couldn't use because of minor bugs or incomplete interfaces. Just try manipulating fonts on a TPrinter canvas and you'll see what I mean.
The concept was great. I drooled for the chance to get my hands on it. I would have gladly paid the $1K if the test/GPL version had proven a little more robust. I eventually had to abandon it too. If the finished shipping product had that many problems, I wasn't going to wait for the fixes. Now, I'm glad I didn't.
It's really a shame. Borland used to be the best there was on compiler/IDE usability. Their vision wasn't lacking on Kylix, just their engineering. Oh well. Back to the fish tank.
--==-- I've found Karma to be a relative thing... Ya know, the kind you invite to Christmas...
RAD tools are pretty dodgy - at least, Delphi certainly is. Yes, it's quick to wack together simple GUI programs, but the code produced is often brittle and difficult to maintain. The company I work for has some Delphi products, and the original architect of those admits that Delphi makes them hard to maintain or change.
I come from a background of using emacs and the command line for building my code, and for me, Delphi sucks big time for being very restrictive and rather stupidly focused on the graphical layout of your project as it's primary organising principle. To me, code has it's own structure and very rarely does it revolve around the look of the application - yet this is the single organisational principle offered to the developer my Delphi. I very strongly think that this is a mistake.
I'm not anti IDE - I've used Visual C++ for C/C++ and Eclipse for Java and I really like both of those environments, because they are based around your code (a class browser being the standard main view). But in the case of Delphi I really think it gives the wrong idea about software development, and the code I've seen produced with it is pretty when it runs, but ugly and brittle on the inside.
IMO the reason that Kylix hasn't sold well is that it is a tool for people who don't understand that code needs to be elegant on the inside, not just flash on the outside.
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.
.. 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.