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Comment by PeCaN | Hacker News Reader

There are still a bunch of modern Windows desktop applications written in Delphi and C++Builder – I work on one of them. ^_^

I really like Delphi actually. It's a shame Embarcadero doesn't really seem to care about it.

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Delphi and C++ Builder downfall sadly started when Borland went greedy and started to scare customers with their lack of business focus, specially the spin off.

I think their biggest mistake was trying to follow Microsoft into .Net instead of taking over the native desktop development niche. A native Delphi 8 with some VB6 import tools would have done wonders for them.

Don't agree.

Their biggest mistakes were focusing on enterprise life cycle tools, selling the developer tools unit, creating an half hearted port of Delphi to GNU/Linux based on WINE, letting all the key developers leave the company.

All these together created the image that most of us should leave Delphi and C++ Builder while it was still affordable to do so.

They have had so many mistakes over the years, embarcadero with their predatory pricing has finally chased me away

Projects I know I'll need to heavily modify or work on for the foreseeable future, I bring forward into Lazarus. Lazarus has quite a bit of activity in its community.

Lazarus did huge improvements in last 5 years, just MacOS version needs more love.

I keep spending tons of time fighting problems, even with mainstream libraries like sqlite.

Still the best tool for multiplatform desktop apps development.

I spent time recently in the webcasts for the new version of Delphi, and from what I saw they're doing some good work. The mobile development for example is enticing.

But, and I asked during the webcasts, who's going to buy into a new project now?

For myself I have a couple of old D7 apps for clients that have been running for a decade now.

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