Inprise/Borland Developers Conference Linux Nuggets

ghjm writes "I just got back from the Inprise/Borland Developers Conference in Philadelpha, where some results from the recent survey--as well as some actual products--were announced." Click below to read ghjm's full report on the results of their surveys, the performance of their C compiler vs GCC and more.

Inprise has offered Interbase for Linux for over a year now, which is very much worth looking at--but the problem is, the Linux version is only 5.1, where the NT, Solaris and HP/UX versions are all at 5.5, so there's been some question about Inprise's commitment to Linux. At the conference, they announced that Linux development is still going strong, and that while Interbase 6.0 would be released for NT first, its Linux release would be in the following quarter. The NT release is currently planned for mid-2000.

Inprise also announced JBuilder for Solaris and JBuilder for Linux. This is based on what they call "JBuilder PrimeTime" which is JBuilder in Java. Apparently JBuilder was originally written in Delphi, and over time they have been porting pieces of JBuilder to run natively in Java. The currently shipping JBuilder 3, which is only for Windows, is not yet 100% Java; however, JBuilder for Solaris, which will ship by the end of the year, will be. It will be followed up in short order by JBuilder for Linux in early 2000. There are strong rumors that JBuilder for Solaris was moved up at Sun's request, because they want a better development tool on Solaris than Java Workshop to prop up their hardware sales in the developer market.

With all this Linux stuff going on, there were a dozen or more Linux-oriented sessions at the conference; quite a change from last year. And of course, the Delphi team had to get their hand in. They did not make any announcements; in fact, they made it quite clear that they have not yet decided what to do. However, they did give out some results from the developer survey: The most interest is in Delphi, followed closely by C++Builder; the vast majority want a full RAD environment, not just traditional tools; native GUI support is by far the winner (as opposed to Motif or [shudder] WINE), with KDE preferred over Gnome by a small margin--though it goes unsaid that if you could have chosen more than one, everybody would have picked both. They have had 16,000 responses since the survey went on-line, which they consider an excellent turnout.

Following these announcements, they did a demo of what they've been working on so far. As many of you know, the back-end compiler is the same between Delphi and C++Builder, as of Delphi 3/C++Builder 2. What they showed was bcc running on Linux (specifically, Red Hat 6.0 using Gnome). They compiled Xgalaga with both gcc and bcc, with bcc getting the job done in a little less than half the time that gcc took. They then ran the resulting binary to show that it was real, working code. Watching the demo closely, it was also possible to see that the binary that resulted from bcc was smaller than the one gcc produced, though there's no way of telling whether this was due to smaller code or just different debugger settings. And of course the real interest is in the RAD environment, which they did not demo; the question of whether Delphi for Linux will include the VCL is yet to be answered. But it's clear that work is ongoing, and if they've already invested enough time to get bcc running, it seems quite likely that a product release will actually happen someday.

Of course, Inprise/Borland is not an open source company and all these products will be commercialware, and there are still issues to be resolved concerning how quickly they will support new kernels, libcs and distros; how nicely they will play with the other kids; how the community will react to the concept of for-pay, closed-source development tools; whether their licensing will permit you to build open source projects using Borland tools; etc; etc. There are many ways they could screw things up, and even if they do everything right, it is not at all clear that a large market exists for for-pay development tools, in the presence of really quite good free ones. However, I think the "linux market" and the "linux community" are increasingly divergent concepts, and there may well be room for Delphi somewhere in the market--if perhaps not so much in the community itself. "