Delphi Turns 10

NavySpy writes "Today is Delphi's Tenth Birthday! The launch of Delphi 1.0 occurred on February 14th, 1995 at the Software Development '95 conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Numerous links are commemorating the event, including a recorded interview with Zach Urlocker and Gary Whizin, members of the original management team. Zack's original Product Definintion document is here. An attendee at the original event reminisces about the launch."

Comments

Re:Wasn't Free

[bentfork]

They tried to do the linux thing a couple years back. Something called kylix. Sadly no one seems to know about the free ( as in, you use it you give your stuff away free ) Borland® Kylix(TM) 3 Open Edition (their name, not mine).

I haven't done any delphi work in a couple years, and have never heard anyone talking about kylix. Anyone have any experience with it?

Re:Wasn't Free

[Pig Hogger]

I've worked full-time some 5 years with Delphi (and since then once in a while), so when Kylix showed-up I was necessarly interested, so I downloaded the whole shebang.

Unfortunately, Kylix sucks as much as Delphi rocks; the code is not stable, as it reportedly uses WINE to run. And the basic "free" Kylix version is practically crippled as it does not includes the database components.

Delphi, how I love thee, let me count the ways

[Latent Heat]

1. Alternative toolset to Microsoft -- if you didn't like the Microsoft way, you had an alternative.

2. Blazing-fast compiles -- there is nothing out there like it, not even the IBM Jikes Java compiler comes close.

3. Great string handling. They even extended their dynamically-allocated string idiom to arrays of primitive types.

4. Made Pascal more C-like -- the PChar C-like null-terminated string (they had to introduce it to be compatible with Windows, but now that they have "gone .NET", they are deprecating it). While it made Pascal less safe, the "I can write a 2-line C program that takes pages of Pascal" kind of went away. You can cast types, pointers, etc, to "remove the safety locks" if need be.

5. You don't have to use the VCL -- you can program to the Windows API if you are so inclined.

6. Good debugger, {$APPTYPE CONSOLE} compiler pragma allows opening a console Window in a Windows app for logging traces, etc.

7. While the support for COM and ActiveX not nearly as seemless as the VCL, a lot better than MFC/ATL.

What don't I like? I am old Pascal hand, but all that typing is getting a little tiresome after doing work in Java and C++. Also, an ActiveX control is this single .OCX file, and it works across Windows versions. To distribute .VCL controls, you have to have a freakin differnt version for each version of Delphi (Delphi version upgrades break more stuff than Windows upgrades).

Re:Ahead of its time, etc.

[AndroidCat]

I'm not sure what future Delphi has. One of its advantages was the VCL libraries which were way better than MFC. Now with .NET, Delphi is just another .NET language. Delphi 8 seemed like a clunky mis-step between environments and was replaced in less than a year with Delphi 2005. I doubt I'll upgrade. Borland's documentation has gone from the best to almost non-existant. (And they never document the nickel and dime'ing of missing features from the Pro version vs Enterprise and Architect versions.)

Re:OSS Compiler ?

[xoboots]

Sort of -- there is the cross-platform Free Pascal:

http://www.freepascal.org/

"The language syntax is semantically compatible with TP 7.0 as well as most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings, widestrings, interfaces). Furthermore Free Pascal supports function overloading, operator overloading, global properties and other such features."

There is an associated project that aims to duplicate the VCL called FCL:

http://www.freepascal.org/fcl/fcl.html

Finally, there is the related Delphi-like IDE to go with it:

http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/

It's actually quite good.