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Comment by vintagedave | Hacker News Reader

There are many big and well-known software packages written in Delphi. Yet Delphi the language is not well known.

I recently read an article on Flutter comparing to native Android layouts, and thought to myself: Delphi has had a x-plat framework that does all that, and more, in less lines of code, for six years.

(*) Disclaimer: I work for the company that makes Delphi. I do that because I think it and its sister C++Builder are great products and want to see it better-known.

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There's a big obstacle to Delphi adoption that people below have mentioned: Cost. Even the starter pack has a limit of $1000 in revenue, and Delphi costs $3000 or so. I'm never going to use Delphi if it means that five years later, my app that costs $3 and makes a sale a week will need me to spend $3000 licensing it or open me up to lawsuits.

I like Autodesk's license for Fusion, it's free to use (the full version) until you're making $100,000 in yearly revenues, after which it costs some amount of money. If I were making $100k in revenues (and probably well before that), I would happily pay for the tool that's making me money, but paying 3x my revenue for the IDE/language is hilariously prohibitive. There's also no way in hell I'm going to spend $3000 for a hobby project that may or may not make $100 during its lifetime.

It's too bad, too, because I remember how easy and quick developing in VB4/VB5 was, so Delphi sounds great on paper, and I would definitely use it to develop at least some applications if it weren't so expensive.

>It's too bad, too, because I remember how easy and quick developing in VB4/VB5 was, so Delphi sounds great on paper, and I would definitely use it to develop at least some applications if it weren't so expensive.

I have been having these thoughts for the past few weeks. After the watching DHH's RailsConf Keynote and thinking about Conceptual Compression, and current technology. Why have we made everything 10x more complicated over years. It is not just Web Sites, Apps as well. VB may be ugly, but it lower the entry barrier. ( VB.Net is an entirely different thing ). Delphi literally have everything done right for well over a decade and it's idea and philosophy aren't being copied anywhere.

Instead of making software easier for everybody to learn, easier to maintain and less prone to bug, making debugging easier, higher performant and less recourse hungry. We have managed to bloat the framework, the languages, the CPU and memory resources, trillion times more abstracted. Everything is a hack over another hack.

Exactly. The problem with Delphi is that it tries to be too many things, for example we don't need another language ecosystem, but we do need great cross-platform UI toolkits/development workflows. Delphi excels at that, but if the library I want to use isn't available for the language, I'm out of luck.

If we could keep the great dev tooling and UI toolkit, but use a language with a larger ecosystem, that would be much more impactful. Maybe Python + Qt can be the answer to that.

I think the cost of Delphi is more a sign of the fact that not a lot of people adopted it, or at least not a lot of people currently use it. I tried to use Delphi when it first came out as Pascal was my favorite language at the time. But the IDE was incredibly buggy and would crash on a regular basis, so obviously not a lot of people adopted it then and probably never gave it a second chance.

Delphi 1.0 struggled as a 16-bit Windows application as the transition to 32 bit happened. The next version was considerably more stable.

Delphi was awesome through 7.0. I didn't really track it after that, but I was a Delphi programmer for several years from release onwards (happened to come from a college that taught Pascal for the first year of CS), then worked for Borland on Delphi/C++Builder for a couple of years after that.

Borland really mishandled their language stack by alienating all the grassroots. Nothing against the later owners, but Delphi's pricing became absurdly tilted towards legacy enterprise projects.

Lazarus was mentioned earlier. Think they're fully compatible with the 7.0 state of things, which was decent. It's worth checking out for project prototyping, etc.

Have you looked at Lazarus[1]? It's open source, has a cross-platform GUI framework (wrapping native widgets) with a VB-/Delphi-like GUI builder and uses the Free Pascal compiler[2] which implements a supposedly fairly Delphi-compatible Object Pascal dialect.

[1] http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

[2] https://www.freepascal.org/

Lower the prices... Or make it more accessible like how JetBrains did before they switched to a subscription model? That would give you instant developer love.

In an alternative reality, Delphi would have won and we would have native Delphi apps instead of Electron.

But we can't have nice things.

Specially when many devs refuse to pay for their tools, while asking to get paid for their work.

Good enough is the enemy of good. Good enough and free trumps good and for pay every time.

I'd love to try it...

But my budget for hobby projects is $0, and a time-limited trial isn't useful. Therefore I won't try it, and I won't be advocating it to anyone else either.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

Even so, it’s pretty mediocre that it only builds Windows apps, and putting MacOS and Linux support on different tiers $1500 dollars apart is pretty cruel.

I only use Linux on my case and the starter seems to be Windows-only.

I don't own a Windows license, so this is a non-starter.

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

C++ Builder is great.

Only with UWP and C++/CX did Visual C++ finally gotten visual, and it still doesn't do as well as Builder.

I work for a company that ships a delphi based product, you've not lived till you've hand edited a .dfm ;-)

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