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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

The Delphi compiler, when hosted in the IDE, has done this since 1996 or so.

The symbol table, generated code etc. for every compilation unit is kept in memory and only discarded if the source is modified. All imports across compilation units are done via a double indirection, so the symbols can be unlinked and relinked more easily.

(Sub-second recompiles in Delphi are the norm, not the exception. In large projects, most of the time during dev builds is linking, and that's usually only a few seconds.)

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Which is why I kind of think that it is a bit sad when millennials think Go compilation speed is some kind of achievement.

Specially given Delphi features vs Go ones.

Especially given the CPUs used in the computers back when Delphi was popular.

Yeah that as well, and even Turbo Pascal was already quite fast on MS-DOS systems (I was using it with MS-DOS 5.0).

I've said a couple of times that new language designers should thank their lucky stars that C++ has set the bar for "fast compilation" so low. Coming out of the gate with a compiler that's "faster than C++!" is pretty doable even for a relatively compile-time heavy language. If you had to come out of the gate with something as fast as Delphi to be taken seriously, we wouldn't get very many new languages.

(I mention this in the context of my observation that the minimum bar to be taken seriously for a language is going steadily up. You certainly need a standard library that is powerful out of the gate, whether or not it is necessarily "part" of the language, and we're getting perilously close to the language being required to ship some heavy-duty HTTP stuff, possibly a server implemented in the language, before it stands a chance. Rust may have snuck in under the wire on that, though of course that stack is developing apace even so.)

python has a http server coming with the standard installation

Go (despite its faults) definitely raised that minimum bar; a language needs to arrive with a package manager and doc tools, as well as enough standard library to get non-trivial things going. Rust made the right decision on HTTP - let the ecosystem provide. Of course, the result of that is summarized in the quote by Grace Hopper: “The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.”

There's always the Python way:

Let the ecosystem provide, then, once there's a few clean winners, pick one as the official (while keeping the others there, obviously).

C++/Boost does that

Yes (what is quite inline with the C tradition).

What is interesting is that I can't think of a lot languages that do it. It should be the default, as it's easy, safe, and gets good results. Somehow, it isn't.

And then there's the Haskell's way of: let the community informally choose the one best option, and when somebody uses any of the other ones, just get somebody near him telling "nobody goes there anymore, come to this other place". It works very well, but is a bit confusing for newbies.

Go's minimum bar is well below Active Oberon, Delphi, Eiffel, Java and .NET ones.

Remember I'm not discussing what they have now, though; the question is what they came out of the gate with in their 1.0. I'm fairly confident Go 1.0 was much more useful than Java 1.0. Java 1.0 certainly didn't ship with a built-in web server and routing stack, or even anything close to that high-level functionality, even if it did ship with more data structures that Go has even now. .Net was a closer call, but, then, .Net came later, the bar had raised. Can't speak to the other ones but I would imagine their first releases were also less useful than Go.

> Java 1.0 certainly didn't ship with a built-in web server and routing stack

Kind of, it supported distributed computing via CORBA and RMI.

A built in web server was released as part of Java 6, 2006.

> Can't speak to the other ones but I would imagine their first releases were also less useful than Go.

The fact is that Go, released in 2009, was a pretty bare bones compared to the state of those programming languages in 2009.

Also while Go might had an HTTP package on version 1.0, it surely still doesn't have a GUI framework on 1.8, which those languages had on 1.0.

EDIT: Rephrased a bit the answer.

"A built in web server was released as part of Java 6, 2006."

Go isn't even that old yet. You're welcome to discuss what you like but I'm talking about what thing came with at first release.

"Also while Go might had an HTTP package on version 1.0, it surely still doesn't have a GUI framework on 1.8, which those languages had on 1.0."

Point. And even by 1.0 Java's was at least modestly capable by the standards of the time, as I recall. It didn't have everything, certainly couldn't compete with all the custom widgets you could buy for Windows, but usable.

I believe if Sun and MS had provided optimized AOT native compilers as part of Java and .NET, instead of waiting 20 years to do so or relying on third parties, C++ use cases would be even less than they are nowadays.

Just in cases someone mentions NGEN, it is just intended to enable fast startups.

Delphi is still my favourite ever development environment even though I haven't touched it for over a decade.

IDE power, the VCL, amazing documentation, rapid builds, clean OO language, it had it all.

For building GUI small/medium applications on windows I don't think there have never existed anything more convenient. Not to mention that usually your only deliverable was a single executable file.

Agreed and it was fast at runtime as well, not far off the same speed as C++ for a lot of things, I remember using it for some pretty performance intensive stuff and you could easily drop to assembly if needed.

It was a fantastic development environment even by modern standards but for its time it was well ahead of the curve.

I still try out Lazarus once in a while just for nostalgia :)

It IS fast.

We are doing a project with a company that uses it for all their Windows applications.

Delphi conferences are still a thing in Germany.

It was pretty big over here as well, the last version I used in anger was 7 but I still see the odd job posted for Delphi devs.

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