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Comment by ruph123 | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I heard “Delphi”, I thought it was an ancient programming language that older colleagues used to mention (“... <anecdote> ... many moons ago, back when I used to program Delphi.”).

But so Delphi really is/was a GUI editor? Something like an ancient Qt Creator? And according to Wikipedia it is not even a language but is using “Object Pascal”. Wild.

I wonder why this never comes up when I read a out cross platform GUI frameworks...

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Delphi was something that doesn't really exist anymore, the blending of IDE, programming language and toolkit into a single product. You programmed in Object Pascal, using the VCL toolkit (component suite), and because that was the only thing the IDE needed to support, it was tightly wrapped around those two things. The visual designer was the glue between the pieces.

The result of compiling a delphi project was a native windows executable that used the core win32 API's underneath (the VCL was implemented over bare windows api's). Compiling was blazing fast (seconds), and the executables that came out of it were blazing fast as well (C++ level performance). This contrasted heavily with visual basic, whose apps required a slow interpreter library, which made them cumbersome to install and run.

This post needs more MSVBVM50.DLL or MSVBVM60.DLL :)

IIRC from VB 5 you could compile to a single EXE which I think did not need the runtime DLL?

Delphi is a complete IDE. The language is called Object Pascal but can be informally referred to as Delphi language.

The language itself is far from being ancient and it supports very practical and modern set of features.

The IDE is expensive but there is a Lazarus (basically open source version of Delphi). It is somewhat less polished but is still very nice.

If you search for this exact phrase "cross platform GUI frameworks" there are more then enough links mentioning Delphi/Lazarus. They're of course only usable within their respective environments. Not universal like QT.

I think there goes my weekend, Lazarus looks... interesting!

The language can not only be informally called "the Delphi language", it was actually officially renamed that several years ago. But maybe that never really took hold.

The lack of any free or hobbyist-priced editions when everybody else was giving away their tooling for free more or less killed it off.

It is still beloved by it's acolytes and there are a handful people out there who learned Delphi 20 years ago and stubbornly refuse to use anything else. It's an uphill struggle though because no-one releases a Delphi SDK for anything anymore.

Just curious why don't they do that now? Like a community edition. I guess that's because there are still some licensed editions out there and they are OK with the $$ they bring in. But what about the future?

They do do that: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow...

It's just way, way late to the party, so most guests left :(

Oh that's so sad. Personally I never used Pascal/Delphi because I was barred from using a computer (because my father thought I'd just play games instead of learning anything useful) until late into the 90s and I was not in a CS major, but my father used it extensively as he worked as Math-turned-CS professor in a University and Pascal was pretty popular at the time.

I also read the book about Borland vs Microsoft and kind of feeling sorry that Pascal/Delphi didn't make it.

Just a question, say I wanna develop a 2d map editor for Windows 10, does Delphi win over C# in the sense of RAD?

So as someone who's spent the majority of my programming career using Delphi, it's sadly a bit difficult to give a resounding yes to that.

I do think that for small programs and utilities Delphi is hard to beat.

But C# has become a much more capable and feature rich language, the RAD story isn't terrible for smaller projects (no experience on larger), and you'll have a significantly larger community in the .Net camp. This means more libraries, as well as more articles and people to ask.

Try Lazarus / Free Pascal, it is essentially a free and open source Delphi (really, it has even similar API and some companies who release middleware for Delphi also release it for Lazarus) without the bloat and with support for multiple platforms using each platform's native controls (Delphi also added support for multiple platforms in recent years but it uses some custom mobile-styled widget set that looks alien everywhere). Under Linux you can even choose between Qt and Gtk.

As for your question, here is a video i made ~5 years ago making a simple 2D tilemap editor under Windows - starts from installing Lazarus (as well as a small image editor i wrote in VB5 :-P) to making the editor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3JgeIUo1X0

Also as a bonus here is another video where i make a swapping tile puzzle game (this time under Linux, also includes installing FPC from repository and building Lazarus from source code which IMO is the best way to install it under Linux as to avoid issues common with packaging):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_01Xhd2EJM

Note these aren't tutorials (they do not even have sound), just screencasts. I thought about buying some mic and making some tutorials but i do not think my voice sounds that good :-P

Hah! That looks cool man, and exactly what I want to work on. Back then I only know C++ and didn't use any library, so I used SDL and directly blit some "buttons" onto the screen. Pretty ugly as I had to work out a simple GUI framework by myself, all those callback things.

I'm not sure I agree on the comments about the mobile framework (FireMonkey - FMX for short) looking alien everywhere. The components are platform aware and provide pixel perfect representations of the controls on each platform (that is, if you don't select on a number of them to provide the actual platform specific component) e.g. You can choose for TEdit to provide a styled control, or the actual native edit control. There are pro's and cons to both, and the style option means you can make some very cool looking UI's very quickly.

I would agree some of the early implementations were a little rough around the edges, but the FMX framework is now about 9 years matured into the market. Other frameworks trying to achieve the same are clearly learning a lot from FMX and openly mirroring the architecture and approach, which tells you something about the direction.

I'm not sure how it looks under mobile platforms but on mobile most apps seem to be using HTML-based interfaces that tend to have their own look anyway. However my comment was about the desktop targets (FWIW LCL itself doesn't really have much in term of mobile support) not mobile - if anything, i wrote that it looks "mobile styled" meaning that it looks something like i'd expect to see on a mobile device as opposed to a desktop.

They did it for a while earlier too, circa 2006 with Turbo Delphi Explorer for Win 32 and .NET - two versions. Used both some. E.g.:

https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2010/08/digital-clock-v10-in-3-l...

Link for clock image in above post is broken, sorry. It was a one line digital display that showed time in HH MM SS format, live.

True, however that earlier attempt was quite restricted which limited its usefulness.

Right. Forgot to mention that earlier. IIRC, two key useful features missing were the ability to import and use third-party components[1], and any built-in database-aware controls functionality[2]. They stripped out those two for the two Explorer versions.

[1] That is a key feature of such 4GL-like RAD tools such as VB and Delphi, and a major reason for their success, coming somewhat close to the concept and holy grail of software reuse, like Software ICs/components, first propounded ages ago by Brad Cox:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Cox

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_component

Adding a link for hardware ICs, the parent concept, which is also quite interesting:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit

[2] Removing database controls was another bad idea, because so many apps, even command-line or GUI utilities (not just line-of-business or enterprise apps, need DB support in the programming tool used to develop them.

So they are restricting the ability to evaluate two very important Delphi features which can swing a buy/no-buy decision.

Yes, it is basically Qt Creator, but much much faster and problem free.

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