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?"
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++?
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...
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.
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! :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
The old-style Turbo C IDE does exist for Linux. A clone called RHIDE provides a very similar look and feel, and many new features.
Insightful?!
> but the problem may lie with Delphi, dontcha think?
Elaborate please. It's still the best tool for whipping out large native Win32 apps. Sure, it's dwarfed by the number of users of MS development tools, but then which other development system isn't? The very fact that Borland survived the development tool shakeout and is still around is pretty amazing. Just because MS languages have such an overwhelming market share says nothing about the (lack of) quality of other tools.
> 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.
Yup, the problem is squarely with Delphi. It arrived too late on Linux, when there were already free IDEs of comparable quality and in much wider distribution.
1. If I want to develop a GUI app Linux, after I install Linux on a new box, I can either start developing using one or myriad tools that came with my Linux distro (QT designer, KDevelop, Anjuta etc.), or I can spend time registering for, downloading and installing Kylix. Of course I prefer what I already have, unless Kylix is much better. But it isn't.
2. If I am a small shareware or commercial developer, the price of Kylix is way too expensive.
3. How many large commercial developer port from Delphi under Windows to Linux? Few, at best.
4. Others mentioned bugs in Kylix.
5. If I develop under Linux, probably I want my app to run also on other unixes. Or on Linux, but not only x86 but also other supported platforms. But Kylix limits me to Linux x86.
So, besides a very limited and niche market of commercial GUI apps ported from Delphi/Windows to Kylix/Linux, there is no good reason to pay for Kylix on Linux. No wonder it failed.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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
Yup, the problem is squarely with Delphi.
.NET. It makes you wonder if Borland is migrating from a tools vendor to simply an IDE vendor.
You've never used Kylix, have you?
I haven't had a chance to look at QT Designer or Anjuta, but KDevelop isn't a true visual (RAD) environment. Maybe I'm just spoiled, but I like being able to click on a component and drop it on my form. I'm not aware of any IDE on Linux that is as easy to use as Kylix.
Also, Kylix v3 supports both Object Pascal and C++. It is the Linux equivalents of Delphi and C++Builder.
For a shareware developer, just about any compiler is too expensive. Shareware development has odds slightly greater than the lottery. For commercial use the price is trivial. I wouldn't even mess with the Pro version, I could justify the cost of the Enterprise version in about 2 months.
It's not that Kylix was too late, it's still too early. Linux still doesn't have enough desktop penetration to support it.
But personally I wonder if Borland is having some kind of identity crisis. They have just about dropped all future Win32 support. C++Builder has been removed from their product list, C++BuilderX is the replacement. But 512meg of RAM to run your compiler??? Kylix is on life support. And even Delphi for Win32 is in doubt. Their new tools all seem to be an IDE slapped on top of Microsoft's
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
> If you want to make a difference in the roads Borland takes, I can't
> stress enough that you *must* tell them what you think and what you want.
But we HAVE, time and again, for years. I stopped believing in them a while ago. Their "corporate" focus is so entrenched by now that they're completely losing sight of the developer community that brought them here. I really don't think there's any hope for Borland. It seems that when companies go public and join the "big league" their ability to interface to any non-corporate entity in any meaningful way is lost. I'm looking at their recent product developments and announcements, and I have no clue where they're planning on going. Some of the products are just plain wrong-headed (why bother competing with a C# IDE when every corporate IS shop pretty much gets all their tools through the MSDN?), and others are shrouded in such marketing mumbo-jumbo that I have no clue what they're about. Besides, the field is getting flooded with good RAD tools in every conceivable language nowadays, many of them free and cross-platform, I think Borland's chances of reviving Delphi (i.e. gaining significant market share) are pretty slim. I guess they're still going strong with JBuilder, but I'm sure they'll find ways of screwing that up, too.
So, *why*, exactly, did Borland think Pascal would be a good language to sell to Linux users?
.NET work. But I'm not sure I'd like C/C++ work under Linux much better.
Because those of us who earn a living doing Delphi work asked them to. It gave us a choice of platforms in the future. I certainly don't want to do
I think we should force every C programmer who can't be bothered to do bounds checking to use Delphi. We'd definately spend less time patching our systems.
FWIW, the limitations you mention might be a concern for standard pascal, but for Object Pascal they are generally myths. The only thing OP forces you to do is think about what you are doing.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
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.
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.
6. pascal sucks
again...enaugh said
Oh, you were doing so well until then, and then you turned into a standard troll. Oh well.
The original Pascal was a clunky, limited language, sure. The famous "why Pascal is not my favorite language" covers all that. But Delphi bears about the same relationship to it as perl to sh.
Example: the original Pascal only had fixed-length strings; you had to pad out your strings with spaces to the size of the buffer. And Delphi? Dynamic heap-allocated garbage-collected buzzword-compliant strings. They can even contain null characters, which is one up on C.
And I have yet to find another object system as good as Delphi's, although the VCL lets the side down a bit there, declaring all sorts of things private that should have been protected and the like.
Incidentally, Kylix does offer something over pyqt, pykde, pygtk, and even perl-gtk: speed. Pity about everything else.
I haven't had a chance to look at QT Designer or Anjuta, but KDevelop isn't a true visual (RAD) environment. Maybe I'm just spoiled, but I like being able to click on a component and drop it on my form. I'm not aware of any IDE on Linux that is as easy to use as Kylix.
Well, the Kylix 1.0 install I had was quite unstable. It was at that point that I discovered that i could get 80% RAD using KDevelop and QT designer, rock-solid, and free (beer and speech). The only thing KDevelop lacks IMO is good code completion.
It makes you wonder if Borland is migrating from a tools vendor to simply an IDE vendor.
No, this is MS pulling the Windows paradigm shift v2.0. Borland survived the last one in the early 90's, so they're mopping up. Soon there will be only one significant development tool for Windows.
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.
.. 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.
For my use, it's the right tool. I code mostly cli deamons.
Sadly, I must admit I'm one of the few people whose usage is specific in that way that Lazarus is a very good and sufficient tool
Here are the reasons why Lazarus does not belong in Delphi league
1. It's GTK1, so... no international fonts support, but as I see GTK2 is progressing very well
2. Some fancy features are yet to come in freepascal, but again progressing nicely
3. debugger is weird, it doubles watches, and watches crash IDE a lot, but still a lot better with every new version
4. no integrated help, and I don't need it
5. No database components, at least not finished, then again progressing very nicely
6. No reporting components
Ask that question in few months again, probably response would be a lot different, at least based on reading mailing list archives. Bug fixing and efforts put in Lazarus are enourmous, probably one of the best record of bug fixing ever. Sometimes not even 15 minutes, but almost every bug is fixed in a lot-less-than-daily matter in cvs. Kudos to the Lazarus team, and I really wish them well on replacing Kylix and Delphi as alternative
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