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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?"
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...
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.
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! :)
It is called ease of use, also known as a RAD development. Fact is, using delphi you can get a program done in roughly half the time, complete with a gui ui. That is why Delphi/Kylix is importaint. That is why C# exists (and looks like delphi).
Bad User. No biscuit!
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.