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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

Delphi was my first programming tool so this triggered a nice burst of nostalgia.

Unfortunately I checked the pricing:

For the cost of the professional version you can buy the all products pack from Jetbrains, with the full version of all their IDEs, including their database tool, and have a thousand Euros left over. Assuming that you aren't buying their personal pack, which is quite a lot cheaper.

The professional version of Delphi does not support database connections, for that you need the Enterprise version at twice the price.

Basically purchasing Delphi or using Delphi makes no sense today, unless you are already locked into the ecosystem.

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I didn't see anyone in the comments mention Lazarus yet, so i thought that i'd go ahead and do that: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

It's a free IDE for FreePascal and a set of useful packages that work out of the box and give you a "batteries included" development experience, for CLI apps, desktop software and even some simple web development (though admittedly most other languages do web development better). Here's more information about the component libraries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Component_Library and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Component_Library

Where it shines in my experience is creating GUIs: making a framework that works atop of the system native functionality and abstracts it away was a really good idea - you get a consistent development experience across the platforms (as long as you don't try doing anything too sophisticated) without having to use a common runtime, like Electron makes you. This results in native looking, snappy and not too resource intensive programs. There's even a gallery of what others have made with it here: https://wiki.freepascal.org/Projects_using_Free_Pascal

There are few other platforms that i'd reach for if i'd want reasonably performant desktop software development in a small runtime and with an easy development experience: maybe the old Java Swing or OpenJFX since those are cross platform. Avalonia for .NET doesn't seem quite as stable yet and using Qt Designer would be a tad complex since i'm not intimately familiar with C++ and enjoy languages with simple memory management.

Having worked professionally with Pascal/Delphi for 10 years, it is quite apparent that no one in the industry expects new young companies to build a whole new product from the ground up in Delphi.

This view is reflected in Embarcadero's pricing models. They are not interested in new users, they are just interested in milking those remaining in the Delphi ecosystem for money until those businesses all liquidate or move on.

I used to be far more optimistic about Delphi and its future, but over those 10 years, I grew far more pessimistic. Delphi was really ahead of its time in the 1990s, but has now been overtaken by everyone, and still stuck in a software development world that no longer exists. It's sad, really.

Not sure if it’s necessarily an accurate comparison, but Embarcadero's strategy of purchasing a well loved product then commercializing it to the point where the only people who would ever buy it are large organizations with a legacy of the tool almost feels reminiscent of Oracle.

It is. Because they are now a part if Idera, whose entire raison d'etre is to buy declining technologies and milk them for their licenses.

Among other notable acquisitions under Idera's belt: Sencha (ExtJS), Travis CI, Whole Tomato

That's Broadcom's strategy as well. They buy mature products, cut out the small customers, and try to cross-sell their large customers onto other parts of their portfolio. Seems to have worked for them, up 60% from pre-pandemic highs when they bought Symantec Enterprise.

MicroFocus is also in that kind of business

Or it might be that Delphi (aka desktop application development) just was at a dead-end and this is an accurate reflection of the costs of end-of-life maintenance/development. Compare to other software projects that just get cancelled or thrown to the open source graveyard when profitability takes a hit, there are worse ways to go.

OTOH it's not so expensive for a professional tool. I paid the same for a game engine. Not having a free tier is a hard choice (I got into programming largely because of an early version of Delphi having a free tier), but it's one that they actively made presumably for some kind of reason.

FWIW Delphi being ridiculously expensive for non-enterprise users was something they started back in early 2000s, long before Borland/Inprise/CodeGear was bought by Embarcadero. IIRC the last Delphi you could buy for cheap was Delphi 5 Standard for $99. In Delphi 6 (when they started going hard into enterprise stuff) the $99 tier was for Delphi 6 Personal which was only for non-commercial applications and by Delphi 2005 (2-3 versions later) the cheapest price was ~$500 (the free stuff was dropped, there was a free "Turbo Delphi" later but it was very limited and was based on one of the worst versions of the IDE and was discontinued - this "give some version for free only to take it away and not support it in the future" was also something that kept people away from Delphi even when CodeGear/Embarcadero/etc tried to give free stuff).

That is precisely my thought as well. Embarcadero/Inprise/Borland have priced themselves out of the market.

Also, in this time and age not including database connectivity to "enterprise" databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL out of the box is bizarre.

Stuff such as Interbase connectivity is something hardly anyone needs anymore but that is packaged as standard while much more needed features such as connectivity to other databases, extended REST controls etc is available only in more expensive versions of the IDE.

I wish they sold a single version of the IDE (under $200) with additional options available as add-ons which can be purchased commercially. Example: FMX GUI.

Depends how much one values having something that matches .NET productivity and actually compiles to optimized native code ahead of time, with 25 years experience in production, instead of the jokes that NGEN and .NET Native have been.

Maybe .NET 7 (still one year away) might finally catch up with Delphi.

Or that after 25 years, there is still no C++ tooling that matches C++ Builder, Qt kind of comes close, but still misses the whole experience.

Microsoft for a couple of years seemed to finally understood it when they released C++/CX, but politics killed the project.

Delphi/Builder have had their own problems as well. One of my competitors was suffering for a long time because they couldn't create 64-bit executables.

Sure, Visual Studio team seems to have lots of expertise dealing with 64 bit support issues. :)

None the less I could support 64 bit and my competitor couldn't. For this application it was critical, my competitor lost a lot of business because of it.

Bad for him, good for you, I guess.

Additionally, I think it only reveals the lack of ability to do a mixed architecture product, given that 64 bit Windows does support 32 bit binaries as well. Just like Visual Studio has been doing since VS 2015.

Apparently your competitor wasn't in the position of doing a polyglot project as workaround.

Although maybe that wasn't something that the customer would be open to.

This was a component that ran under the print spooler so there was no ability to run the 32 bit version in 64 bit Windows. It really was bad for him and good for me.

Of course he could have re-written it in C++ and maybe that was what he did in the end, I never checked.

I don't think anything except Visual C# comes close in terms of being able to build GUIs As for cross platform mobile apps, is there even any RAD tool other than this?

The reason for Delphis lack of popularity now is because the era of the desktop application died around 2012 or so.

Everything is a webpage now, including many mobile apps. The cost we have paid by using HTML and JS as the way to build apps is not well recognized - everyone only does it because there is no real alternative. The Stockholm syndrome is fully matured.

React/Angular etc are the equivalent of what the VCL was to the crude Win32 API and MFC base. React is as close to RAD as you can get without a visual designer.

If I was going to develop mobile apps that were much more than a CRUD like UI, I'd probably opt for Delphi

Desktop applications are quite alive in specialised domains like life sciences laboratory domains, multimedia, gaming, among others.

Office 365 and Google docs will never be more than Works was capable of, and 3D APIs are so good experience, stuck in 10 years old hardware design, that everyone just tried once more to push streaming instead.

The desktop application is nearly dead on the consumer side (but not quite: Photoshop, Office, etc. are still extremely popular).

But in medicine, finance, manufacturing, industrial design, aerospace, hospitality, and so on, almost everything is native desktop apps. Mostly Windows, maybe a little Linux, very little macOS. Look at what your doctor is using the next time you visit. It's going to be a traditional desktop app on Windows.

Many of these apps are undoubtedly made with Delphi or C++Builder.

Epic over Citrix…

I think it’s a stretch to call Citrix a traditional desktop app in this context.

They are, but people are now king of expecting to be able to access their software from anywhere, including their phone or tablet. Hard to do, if you have millions of lines of MFC code. Which opens up opportunities for newcomers.

Yup. Tell these cheapskates who downvote me when I tell them they are aware of the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

I agree about the insane pricing.

If you want to use the Prof. version and still have DB-access then there exist some open source components like https://sourceforge.net/projects/zeoslib/

OTOH my 20-year project is still trucking along using D2010 and Dbisam as the DB-layer...

> The professional version of Delphi does not support database connections

You can use open source components or buy components: https://www.devart.com/dac.html

Or you can use a propiertary DB like NexusDB that brings its own connection components - but then you are stuck with a DB without replication support...

I agree, I did purchase Delphi Berlin and a lot of associated closed source components, I created some nice programs for myself to use at home and at work, but decided it was not affordable to renew it.

You can get the community edition now of course, but you can not write a utility you use at work.

Also the professional license is more restrictive than the software is (you can connect to MySQL but you are not licensed to do that), finally the tech support at the company are complete shits about allowing you to re-install software that you paid a thousand pounds for, if you don't stay subscribed. I do subscribe to Jetbrains. I get to use C++, Go, C#, Java, Kotlin Python and MySQL. For nothing.

My father has been working on his accounting software (he's an accountant mainly) since Delphi 1. He might be the only single user paying for the enterprise version. Or maybe there are dozens of them.

Whenever I speak to him, he raves about whatever the new version of Delphi is.

I briefly worked at a Delphi place (zero guesses why I didn't stay), and it was similar there, people being enthusiastic about in my view quite minor releases. One guy had a personal website complete with hand written HTML2 and a collection of Delphi freeware utilities. It was not a bad trip down memory lane, but everythig about the place screamed 'dead end' at me.

That is the large majority of shops whose main business is not to sell software, rather something else.

People rave about what they know, aren't aware HN exists, leave at 5pm, enjoy weekends with family and friends instead of uploading stuff into GitHub, and are happy.

I see what you did here

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Delphi stayed at Borland, and they developed it further without hiking the prices and going all enterprisey, maybe adding RAD tooling with a web slant, ala Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Microsoft bought most of the dev team from borland in the the 90's including ander heijlsberg. That emptied delphi development: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/borland-sues...

The measure of the worth of a tool is how quickly it can help you to get a quality working product in the hands of end users.

Do programmers today actually value their time?

Do they know how to negotiate good prices for products and services they provide customers and clients?

The quality is Delphi is rooted in the third-party components that help to ship good quality products quickly.

There is a free version that beats anything you can get out of Jetbrains. So why don't folks just download the free version and try it out instead of listening to naysayers and cheap skates on HN?

I mean Uber drivers pay more for their working tools than software developers and they don't whinge about it, when software developers are supposed to be capable of earning more than uber drivers. What's this beggar they neighbour attitude among software developers?

I don't disagree with you, if it was really good however there are better (more productive) languages that Jetbrains have excellent IDEs for.

If we want to talk about productivity and power, Delphi is now so expensive that it is in the same neighborhood as a LispWorks licence.

If Delphi was much more powerful it might be a reasonable investment, as it is, it is powerful than most of the languages Jetbrains ship IDEs for and widely more expensive.

You ignore that Delphi is not just the IDE, it is the whole ecosystem of components that are developed to work with it, and these components usually come with source code and are supported by developers who are incentivised to make them work.

It is the tool used by developers whose customers want custom stuff done yesterday, customers whose time is 100s worth more than the trifling sums that open source developers are unable to get even their commercial users to pay for or contribute to.

This is precisely the type of attitude that keeps Inprise/Idera or whoever it is that owns Delphi from coming up with a reasonable price for the product which the market can afford. Refusing to listen to the end users has been Borland's bane since the late 1990s and continues through Inprise/Idera etc

The product is free until you make your first $5000 or so. If you can't make $5000 from your work then you are in the wrong business.

It is $5000 for a product which doesn't even connect to "enterprise" databases. Good luck trying to make a living using that.

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