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Comment by taberiand | Hacker News Reader

Does Delphi justify its cost? As far as I can tell, there are no free compilers - seems like a pretty high hurdle when most languages can be used for free.

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> Does Delphi justify its cost? As far as I can tell, there are no free compilers - seems like a pretty high hurdle when most languages can be used for free.

The bigger problem is that you are stuck with whatever features Embarcadero thinks are important.

For example, Delphi didn't have a 64-bit version for an excruciatingly long time. How many companies using Delphi got run over by a competitor during that window?

At this point, if a language isn't open source, I simply won't use it. I have been burned too many times on the proprietary front to ever give in on that anymore.

Unless one was creating a library or had an application that used an enormous amount of memory, 32-bit or 64-bit really didn't matter. IOW, for most desktop applications, it was a non-issue.

Not to take anything away from the general gist of your argument, but why would a company get run over by a competitor simply for not offering a 64-bit build? This seems extremely far-fetched to me.

Not if your product is something like a CAD tool (see: Altium).

How many customers did Altium lose because a design was bigger than they could handle?

Memory limits and extra speed (intel) are important for many apps.

For macOS there still isn't a 64 bit compiler from Embarcadero. They promised it will come in a future release and then you can port your firemonkey (FMX) apps. But of course that will set you back a couple of thousand in upgrades and put you on an subscription model. For several years I hoped that FMX would get mature, even ended up building a product with it. You must sit on their subscription model if you want updates/fixes and yes you need those as the (macOS) product has plenty of issues.

Meanwhile freepascal/Lazarus already has a 64 bit compiler and their LCL (like VCL) does have a cocoa (not mature) and carbon (mature) port. I'm sure it has its own issues, but at least it uses native controls, can compile to Linux desktop right now and doesn't cost an arm and a leg if you want a fix.

So yes, pascal is still awesome, not too sure on the commercial version where you don't get fixes unless you pay regularly (anecdote: I bought XE8, couldn't debug on latest macOS about 4 weeks later, that was never fixed in XE8, ended up debugging via an earlier OS X)

Yes, I remember one of my competitors suffered for a long time because they couldn't support 64 bit. This was a component in the print spooler so they couldn't just run the 32-bit version, they really did lose customers over it.

There are free compilers for Pascal, the language — "fpc" is the Free Pascal Compiler. http://www.freepascal.org/

That may or may not be close enough to commercial Delphi, depending on who you ask.

fpc is genuinely excellent, I used it more than a decade ago and it's only improved since then.

If you are doing commercial work the cost is easy to justify.

My main concern would be whether you can continue to activate it if Embarcadero drops support or goes out of business.

You'll also have a smaller pool of candidates you can hire, no?

If you hire by checklist then yes. Otherwise, I would expect any competent programmer to be able to grasp Delphi.

I was hired as a C# dev out of college. 6 months in, a legacy Delphi app was dropped in my lap for maintenance. It took me about a month to get up to speed, but after that it was just another platform/language.

I wouldn't expect them to want to though. Not because it's a terrible language to program in, just because it's not going to look as good on a resume for later jobs.

And that’s the sad part of HR departments hiring by checklist, we develop a monoculture which makes it harder to actually see different ways of solving problems or creates a reinventing the wheel syndrome. There are professions that value people with a range of experience. It is really too bad that software development often isn’t one of them.

Wow. Is this actually a major concern with some people?

Around D.C., there's this tendency for employers to be very open with what languages you've used before.

Have you only used Ada? Welcome on-board, though we have no uniforms here.

Only used Erlang? Are you guys still saying you can see the whitehouse from your building?

And for some reason C#/Java are considered almost the same language, depending on whom you talk to.

Honestly, good people are good, and we don't have enough of them to become picky about demanding 5+ years experience in exactly what you are already doing. It'll take a month to onboard someone regardless of if they've used the language or not before.

> Wow. Is this actually a major concern with some people?

https://aeon.co/essays/how-work-changed-to-make-us-all-passi...

Tends to be something more mature developers are better suited to; though there might be higher salary expectations.

Do all competent programmers check the 'Delphi' job postings?

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