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Comment by ahacker15 | Hacker News Reader

Delphi is still popular in the south of Brazil. It's dying, but slowly.

There's a lot a legacy application written in Delphi here. Some old programmers, that only know to program in Delphi, may even build new apps with it.

It may not be that modern today, but there's the "pay the bills" mindset.

I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately.

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> I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today.

I agree with your diagnosis. The problem is that Embarcadero doesn't understand that, and when it does (or when someone else buys Delphi), it may well be much too late to revive it. They could really position various versions of the product in a different way, making the lower tier more affordable.

I think they do understand that, they just see their opportunity elsewhere. The reason is the only price that would satisfy the complainers is free, which isn't going to be very profitable.

There is a community of locked in customers who are wiling to pay to keep their projects going, it makes sense for Embarcadero to milk them.

That market can only possibly be diminishing over time. I mean sure, $bigco can afford ~3k/user/year, but eventually, that's gonna dry up.

Charging for basic development tools in 2017 just seems weird, and I'm afraid by the time they realize that the company is dying, the mindshare will be gone, never to return.

There's no money in devtools for general desktop app development. Embarcadero knows that the only way to grow the delphi userbase is to make it free, so they're instead trying to milk it for all it's worth on the way down.

I had a bit of hope for delphi with mobile app support, but the pricing really killed it now that microsoft offers xamarin for free.

Plus, object pascal is too weird for js coders. C-style syntax is a must, even though object pascal is in many ways a better language.

I don't agree making it free is the only option. Delphi is now multiplatform. There are several companies with a development tool targeted at just one of these platforms, charging money for it - usually not much, but the subscription model makes it more expensive in the long run. Imagine having just Delphi for Android free. If I could release the same app for iPhone by coughing up $200, why shouldn't I? They could also release a basic version at a very low price, unlocking features in the more expensive editions. Yes, they can actually study the usage cases and examine what extra features are indispensable for current paid customers but could be removed in the basic version without much problem for an average developer. There are so many ways they could play this out, I'm really disappointed they've chose this route.

I would happily pay. So would many others. Things do not need to be free, they just need to be priced within reason.

Yes it will dry up but by then I expect they will have made a ton of money. This isn't an unusual pattern, I've seen it with a few platforms I've worked with.

Don't think it needs to be free. Just priced reasonably. Jetbrains seems to be thriving. And their IDEs do not cost thousands of Euros.

You're right. The IDE has grown outdated, we just need the old Delphi (no .NET stuff) with an updated IDE.

Funny enough, I can produce Delphi executables that run perfectly on Linux and Mac using Wine. That means executables that run on anything from Windows 95 to any modern desktop operating systems available today.

Why the heck did they decided to kill such a good platform.

I've moved to Java back in 2010. From my perspective was the best next thing (platform agnostic, rock-solid) but still miss my Delphi IDE to create good looking UI apps with ease.

>I think Delphi will die, but only because it costs a fortune today. If it had a resonable price, many people would continue to use it indeterminately.

http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Did you try it? I try it every year (I was a Delphi fan and full time Delphi programmer from Delph-1 to 6) but it is not very good. The Pascal compiler is brilliant and fast but Lazarus itself is unusable every time I try. It often begins by failing to build the basic form until I go through a bunch of steps to fix the install. That's going to put most people off as Delphi never had that issue; it was install-and-go. And after that it depends a bit on the position of the moon what happens. For instance, I just installed it again because of your post and when I press Run, I get http://imgur.com/a/blFNC . But even when you have it running, it keeps being highly unstable. Maybe it's just me but I doubt it.

Installing Lazarus from the package managers in Linux really does suck even today, I wish they would fix it or just remove it from those repositories.

I Finally got the Linux version running on Mint by downloading and installing the files from their repository as recommended and it was a nice experience after that

Windows is another matter entirely, just download the setup, run it and go

Lazarus is a very active project, currently I rate it up there with delphi XE2 (the version I use currently) and it can only improve

I've been working with Lazarus on a daily basis for a while now (I work at a mostly Delphi company, but our server code runs on Linux so we write it in Lazarus). Can't say I have the same problems as you do. My host is a ubuntu machine, and I did install the latest version from their website, not from the package manager. This seemed to fix most of my issues with Lazarus.

I will retry again on Ubuntu. Maybe it's where I install from.

Last time I tried it I did on a virtualbox VM and everything seemed to work.

I don't see anything in your link, by the way.

> I don't see anything in your link, by the way.

Ah sorry about that; I am in China and internet is very slow & often broken (HN is very fast though). Probably the image did not (fully) upload. It was an error telling the application crashed. Just the empty default form after pressing run.

Just so no one else has to try to find the price (you have to search for it a little). The cheapest new user price for Delphi is USD $1,405.

Or $0, if you use the Starter edition. It's free for hobbyists, students, startups etc, with the clause that if you start making over a certain amount of revenue you're asked to buy it.

but it seems and correct me if i am wrong you cannot use the starter edition to create an application that connects to a database

which in my opinion makes it useless, RAD tools are mostly used to create line of business applications

..which blocks off a lot of arbitrary features, including iOS, OSX, UWP, and 64 bit compilation of all things.

It's the same for almost all of the great programming environments of the 80s and 90s that still exist. Commercial CommonLisps are also super-expensive, so is Xojo (=Realbasic).

They should have license fees based on how much money the developer earns, but I guess it's too hard to calculate long-term revenue and to ensure that the developers don't cheat.

Yes, the cost is ridiculous. Delphi used to be an affordable tool. I've been a big fan of Delphi and would still be developing Windows apps in Delphi, except for the excessive pricing. Stopped renewing my licenses two years ago.

Delphi had the flexibility of Visual Basic without the deployment problems.

Unlike VB, all the controls and libraries were written in Delphi itself, which allowed you to walk through each and every library when debugging problems.

I always thought the new Visual Studio pricing model was a good way to go for this: Free for teams of <=5, cost/seat for teams above that.

I suppose if you go that route you need a legal team that can afford to be on the lookout for violators though.

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