Comment by Mister_Snuggles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mister_Snuggles | Hacker News Reader

Mister_Snuggles

While I don't necessarily want a Delphi-like thing for Web development, I do want a Delphi-like thing for developing GUI desktop applications.

So far I've tried out a few things, but for some reason they don't "feel" the same as Delphi did. Maybe it's because I'm older and have moved on to different tools, or maybe it's because I haven't made the time to properly invest in these.

Anyways, here's what I've played with:

- NetBeans - Has a form builder, I'm comfortable with Java, it's cross-platform enough. I'm not sure why I've never used it for my personal GUI apps, even though I've built a bunch of little things to use for work.

- SharpDevelop - Looks great, checks all the boxes for doing GUI development, but I'm not comfortable enough with C# or VB.NET to use it effectively.

- Lazarus - Currently playing with this now. Feels a lot like Delphi (as it should!). I'm disappointed in how much Object Pascal/Delphi I've forgotten though. It brings back a lot of good memories though.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but just today I was thinking about how I miss Visual Basic 6... Such a great IDE for slapping together a crummy GUI with buttons, textboxes and labels all slightly misaligned :) I'd love to have something similar for Python.

I miss VB6 at times (the tooling - not so much the language) as well. It was so simple to create a functional Windows application as compared to writing a web application to do the same thing.

Try Gambas

Best approximation I've found is PyQt/PySide with Qt Designer. My template projects:

https://bitbucket.org/Odoth/pyqt5-template

https://bitbucket.org/Odoth/pyside-template

Have you tried Xojo (used to be called REALbasic)? It's the closest I've found to Delphi, especially in that it builds & deploys really easily (eg no Java runtime required, feels native, never feel like I'm fighting with the compiler and my tool-chain).

I haven't played enough with Lazarus to see how they compare though, it looked promising too.

Did you try Qt? Creating GUI with qtdesigner is similar to Delphi, and Qt Studio is well integrated nowadays.

I haven't yet, but it looks like something worth checking out. Thanks!

I think the primary downside people find with QT is the language support. People want cross-platform, native UI (i.e. not GTK) in a statically typed language higher level than C++. Even Go versions require a long compile time and don't work w/ the msvc toolchain and (IIRC) QT quick and QML are a bit hamstrung if you want to do advanced things with controls.

I would love full QT with a modern, high-level static language that is not hobbled on Windows. .Net may be the first to get there with a quality cross platform UI (Mono's WinForms are a bit hobbled too).

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