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Comment by phatbyte | Hacker News Reader

I've always hated the Delphi ecosystem, awesome IDE, good-enough language, but everything else sucked, specially if you are a young programmer with limited money, you couldn't learn it unless you pirated it, even .NET had a free version. Everything there had a price-tag, from the IDE to the third-party libraries.

So yeah, everyone moved on from Delphi, it's currently on palliative care, probably won't die any time soon, but it's becoming irrelevant as time goes by. If it wasn't for this post I wouldn't even remember it. We have much better technologies and IDE today. Good riddance Delphi.

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http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ has been around since 1999. Not like it's _that_ old, but for technology, it's pretty old.

Lazarus didn't became really usable until around 2007 or so and even then it wasn't until ~6-7 years ago when it became stable. Previously you'd get lots of crashes, weird behavior and other issues in your own programs. Your programs would just crash without you knowing why and the debugger integration was abysmal (it still is subpar, but AFAIK that is a GCC issue and is why they are working towards a new custom debugger).

The project might have started in 1999 (actually the codebase is slightly older according to their history page) but it took a decade for it to be usable.

Of course today things are much better. It is the most stable environment i've worked with (as long as you stick with the official stable releases anyway - note that releases from getlazarus.org are not official and often contain immature code) and even though it isn't as fast as Delphi in terms of compilation speed (and sadly the FPC devs do not care about compilation speed... what is with compiler devs these days giving zero care about compilation speed? Sometimes it feels like only Borland cared about it) it still is faster than most environments (except Borland's) i have used.

Was a different business model from a different time, making money directly off of selling good developer tools. Even Apple and Microsoft charged for their development tools until relatively recently, I believe.

Now open source and vendor tools have completely won that space, and its only possible to profit from developer tools indirectly. So not just Delphi, but the entire associated business model has become irrelevant.

JetBrains makes the best developer tools I've used, and while they offer free, community licenses, their more advanced tools still require a paid subscription.

It comes to my mind Unity (game engine), they have a very good business model. Their offer a free version to anyone willing to try, and premium tiers for more serious developers or companies.

When was that? I remember Delphi being great because it was the one GUI builder you easily could get a free license for (6/7/2005, and before that you could get cheap licenses of Delphi 3 somehow)

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