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Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else have the impression the most of the advantages OP lauds Delphy/ObjectPascal for are also present in Go?

...is there any nice cross platform desktop UI system for golang? (with an actual user base... because these things have bugs that can only be find through extensive real world usage unfortunately...).

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I worked with both OP (ObjectPascal) and Go, and Go really catches much of the spirit of OP. BUT Delphi is an IDE that was designed specially for making out most of ObjectPacasl (and ObjectPascal has extensions to interface back with the IDE) nothing in Go Ecosystem comes close to that

But if someone saw the opportunity and decided to fill in that niche, I'd be the first to spend my money on it. Make it cost $1000, it doesn't matter - a modern language plus and excellent IDE it's something really worth spending my money on.

Let's talk. I've been thinking about building something like this for my own use; I think I'm not the only one.

You're not going to be able to do it, at least not in the same way as Delphi. Go lacks the complete OO and component functionality that allows Delphi to provide its level of integration between the IDE and the code/components. It's not just a language that was popped into an IDE, rather the IDE and the language were created to work together as one, and it all revolves around proper class support/RTTI.

Chuck Jazdzewski, one of the original developers that helped create Delphi, did a series of blog posts that details some of the thought processes behind Delphi:

http://removingalldoubt.com/

We sell a Delphi-like IDE for web applications (Elevate Web Builder) that uses Object Pascal, and the only other language we would even attempt to implement with the IDE/compiler is C#. It's the closest in terms of features/behaviors to Object Pascal, with the main difference being multi-cast event handlers (delegates) in C#, which is really just a compiler-syntactic-sugar detail.

Thanks for sharing Chuck's blog. Just read a few posts now and one of them:

The Biggest Bang:

http://removingalldoubt.com/programming/2015/07/17/the-bigge...

reminded me of the point that Delphi 1 was itself written in Delphi:

"It seemed that after every feature Anders showed people cheered and when Anders showed that Delphi itself was a Delphi app we received a standing ovation. I knew we had done something remarkable; something I will always be proud of."

Looks like the other posts will be interesting too.

OO in Go is quite peculiar, but not impossible. I'd even say you could quite naturally code methods and properties of components, while events would have to be a part of this particular implementation. In any case, I completely agree: whoever decides to do it, they'll have to take Go's peculiarities into account and instead of making an exact copy of Delphi in Go, create a new project leveraging the specific features of Go and reflecting them in the GUI construction in an elegant way.

Yeah, my comment came off a little harsh. I'm not discouraging someone from creating a Go IDE like Delphi, I'm just saying that one should be prepared to make allowances for what the language can/cannot do, given that one cannot change the language. The original Delphi team had the enviable position of being able to modify the language to suit the IDE, and vice-versa.

> Does anyone else have the impression the most of the advantages OP lauds Delphy/ObjectPascal for are also present in Go

Just kind of, because sadly Go still has a lot to catch up with Object Pascal features and compiler toolchain.

However Delphi has more modern language features than Go, such as generics, full object orientation and reflection.

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