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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Anyone well versed on the current situation with Delphi? Is it still a thing? Is it any good? According to the promotional material on their website, Delphi RAD Studio is supposed to be the holly grail of cross platform application development(Apparently they support iOS,Android,Linux, Windows, MacOS including Apple M1).

For most people though, including me, Delphi seems to be something nostalgic. Good old days, the first time I built applications in high school until I get reliable internet connection and gained my bad coding habits with learning PHP.

I remember building a password manager(stored your passwords in a plain text file hidden deeply in the OS folders structure, had an access counter), a lottery coupon filler(generated printable coupon images so you don't do it with a pen) and a port scanner(the remote address tab was called "far address", because English) and getting them distributed on application download websites.

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Delphi, as technology, is amazing. But the company controlling it operates on the model of locking-in existing customers and ratcheting up prices. It's a bad deal for everyone not already stuck in the ecosystem with things they need to maintain. Look up Lazarus for the open source I-can't-believe-it's-not-Delphi

Delphi was my first real programming environment circa 1998.

At least at the time it allowed me to build professionally looking applications with practically nil experience and with little effort.

Well - once upon a time they WAS amazing.

But later they become CodeGear and later their R&D division is moved to Romania. Products become unstable and unreliable.

They had flops, meh versions / releases and good ones stability wise. Just as any other major IDE (or product for that matter).

I own Delphi and still nothing beats it productivity wise for desktop applications. I successfully used Lazarus as well to develop Raspberry Pi based GUI software that controls various electronic gizmos(debugging on Pi was unstable but I've managed).

For products that do not have GUI (or using browser for front end) I stick to C++.

Embarcadero's pricing / marketing though does suck big time. Well, the only product that comes close to Delphi for GUI development is QT and their licensing and pricing sucks even more.

> the only product that comes close to Delphi for GUI development is QT

Wait isn't QT free?

Dual licensed

> their licensing and pricing sucks even more.

Does Delphi even have a LGPL option ? Because with Qt's LGPL you can use it in a lot of proprietary systems without having to pay for a license

Delphi does not have an LGPL option. Lazarus, however, does.

I've already said elsewhere that having read their licensing terms and limits on what parts and how it can be used I would not touch QT with the wooden pole. Not interested in discussing those either. Others might disagree but hey each of us makes their own choices.

I heard Delphi has free version. I did not go into detail as I own commercial version and keep it up to date. But from what I understand you can use their community edition for free as long as you do not make more than $5000 per year.

> I've already said elsewhere that having read their licensing terms and limits on what parts and how it can be used I would not touch QT with the wooden pole.

the OSS licensing terms are the LGPL or GPL.

- https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/LICENSE.GPL3

- https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/LICENSE.LGPLv3

- https://github.com/qt/qtdeclarative/blob/dev/LICENSE.GPL3

- https://github.com/qt/qtdeclarative/blob/dev/LICENSE.LGPLv3

they can add whatever separate licensing scheme they want in addition to that but if a repo has LICENSE.LGPLv3 in it, you can use it under LGPL like every other OSS project (and those two repos cover by far most of Qt, you can pretty much build an entire OS userspace out of them).

Are they still extending the language? I remember that working with strings was somewhat frustrating, for example RegExes were not a thing without external libraries...

>"Are they still extending the language"

Yes they are. I do find it strange though to base language acceptance criteria on regex when there are tons of libs. But yes Delphi has its own as well

> Are they still extending the language?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22328219

I wonder if The Qt Company is looking at them for inspiration the past couple of years...

> I own Delphi

Do you?

Well, the license is perpetual and I maintain VMs with it installed so for all intents and purposes it is no different. Way better than paying monthly fee.

Maybe that’s the only viable business model.

You can see the same pricing scheme with all of these "batteries included" niche products, from Xojo to LispWorks. It looks like the sweetspot is around $1,500/year, sometimes lower, sometimes higher.

I still think they are wrong, though, and these companies would make way more money if they'd cater to the masses at a price range of $30 to $100 per major version (depending on the version/features). In the VST plugin market, price ranges were comparably high until companies figured out that the mass of hobby musicians is more lucrative. Now products are basically on eternal sale, prices reduced from 50% to 95%.

In the VST market increased competition forced companies to lower prices during sales. Maybe the lack of competition prevents the same from happening to IDE companies.

I think you have a point. They should adopt a pricing strategy similar to Jetbrains where they have a non-transferable cheap individual license that can be used commercially, and a more expensive version for enterprise.

I believe many React Native, Electron and other hybrid solutions are made by people like me, who don't want to spend huge amounts of money to test an unknown piece of tech. These people also make recommendations to the companies they work for, which would actually afford to buy these licenses.

Why not think of a "discount" as part of the marketing budget? How much money do they spend on marketing and sales to get new customers? They will get new developers who will improve the branding and gain new "leads" organically.

If they lowered the price they would likely sell a boatload of licenses, because the RAD even 10 years ago was already more advanced than anything existing now. The problem might be that they can't or don't want to set up an infrastructure to offer support to that many developers and companies using it, so they rather squeeze as much money as they can to the few companies buying it because they're forced to in order to maintain older projects. It's a sad reality in which new programmers are discouraged to try a product that is likely better than anything else.

What you are describing _was_ the borland model back in early 1990s. But then they flipped to this high price model in the late 1990s when they changed their name to Inprise.

Borland was awesome, with Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal, Borland C++ and later Delphi they ran circles around their competitors, Microsoft included. It is incredible how they have disappeared from the scene completely.

Yep.

Things like Matlab and Mathematica end up in the $2k to $3k for commercial business, but just a few hundred for hobbyists.

I've been playing with a batteries included (like kitchen sink, but still tiny) Forth language (pretty rare as most Forths are focused on embedded) called 8th that is dirt cheap for a professional edition. I think it has a good price model as it is exactly what I'd be comfortable paying for something niche.

I am not sure that this is fair to LispWorks. I think that I initially paid $3000 for a license and the yearly maintenance fee is about $500. Their support is amazingly good and CAPI is good for UI development.

Still, this is just out of range for most non-professionals. Several times I have considered to buy a LispWorks license for personal usage, but couldn't quite justify the costs.

I am pretty sure they might even sell more professional licenses if they had a wider userbase of enthusiast users.

For anyone curious, a hobbyist license for LispWorks is $500 for a 32-bit version that works on a single operating system, then $250 every year after that. If you actually want to release software other people can use, then it's $1000 and $500 every year after that. If you want to sell software other people can use, double that. Want the ability to use a database? Double it again! Oh, and if you want to release anything but 32-bit software? Double that, too.

All of this is per-seat, too.

It's really "Our company and or university gives us enough money to blow on software that we don't have to look at the prices"-oriented pricing.

LispWorks is amazing software from a development standpoint (though SBCL is significantly faster if you're actually using what you write), but it's also one of the best examples of predatory proprietary software.

> one of the best examples of predatory proprietary software.

Your conclusion is completely wrong. From what I see, LispWorks is making just barely the minimum to make their operation work. I wouldn't classify this as predatory. They're just trying to make enough money to survive on an environment where very few people are willing to pay for software. From what I see, most people using Lisp are hobbyists, and they already use open source products. To survive, LispWorks had to search for companies that wanted/need to pay for a supported version of Lisp.

Now, Microsoft using proprietary software to lock customers, that is predatory.

I don't think the license prices for professionals are too high, but I think there should be affordable license options for non-commercial uses. This could not only generate additional direct revenue but also might increase the number of professional users from enthusiasts who turn professional.

That could be right, but I imagine they already tried that and it didn't work.

I am pretty sure they don't. I was interested in LispWorks since the late 90ies. I downloaded and used a bit the free edition, but that was too limited even for hobby usage. The personal edition was a bit cheaper then, I almost bought it. I would assume, if they had offered something in between, I would have noticed.

LispWorks exists since 1987. Originally developed by Harlequin, a software tools and software applications (Postscript, Lisp, ML, Dylan, ...) company. After Harlequin closed its doors, Globalgraphics bought the remaining assets and employed some staff. They spawned a company. This spawned the current LispWorks company which is a relatively small company dedicated to only the Lisp product.

Initially LispWorks *only* addressed the professional and academic market (for UNIX systems) with the professional edition, enterprise edition, site licenses and special implementations (like the one on NASA's Deep Space One). Over time it got ported to Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS.

A bunch of years ago they have introduced two versions of 'Hobbyist' editions: with delivery and without. This is still expensive, but in reach for dedicated hobbyists (my hobby camera costs like five times of a Hobbyist license).

Meanwhile, mostly only LispWorks and Franz Inc survived in the commercial market for Common Lisp, while all cheaper Lisp offerings (from companies like Expertelligence, Procycon, Corman, Gold Hill, Apple, ... etc.) haven't survived as a commercial and maintained product.

Competitors in similar or more expensive price ranges also went away (Lucid, Symbolics, TI, Xerox, LMI, Ibuki, ...).

Franz and LispWorks must have done something right -> they are still there and publish new releases, while all the other companies (in various price ranges and various target markets) had to give up.

Not sure I noticed the new hobbyist editions, had stopped looking many years ago. The inital professional version was in the same price range though. As you say, they are "in reach" for a dedicated hobbyist and indeed, my camera has cost more. However, I wonder, how many "dedicated hobbyists" are around who want to spend so much money on software. After all, it still is very expensive. 600€ to use it at all, 1200€ to compile a program, more, if you use more than one OS. I even might be willing to spend so much money, if I was really convinced that this is the product I want to use. But then, I won't be convinced until I had the chance to use the product in the first place. That is the vicious circle I see and this is the point I am arguing from: to break this circle.

To attract new users, you first have to show them, that you have a great product, then you can charge them. I am very happy that LispWorks is still a product and wish them all the best. If their strategy works well for them, great! I can only tell the story why I haven't gotten LispWorks, despite having a good impression of the system in the minimal trial I was able to run. But I couldn't try it to the point where I would have been willing to spend that much money on this. I am a Lisp programmer for over 20 years now, 15 of those as a professional developer. I ended up with the stack consisting of SBCL+Slime+LTk. Also quit nice :). At work, our team uses mostly SBCL and Allegro. None of us has used LispWorks, all for similar reasons. And that is, why no one pushed for LispWorks, when purchase decisions were discussed.

Right, paying upwards $1000 for a hobby development tool is not common, even though there are more expensive hobbys.

LispWorks has the no-cost Personal Edition to get an impression and one can get trial licenses of the whole product.

Generally I fear that there is very little money to be made from a low-price (say: $100 - $300) Lisp implementation (the market is still small) and that few people will upgrade to a more expensive version of it (what would be the reason to do so?).

The question is, how many hobbyist licenses get sold at the current price? If that number is rather large - great good for them. If it is only a couple of licenses, then they might consider options which open up the environment to a larger audience. Like people completely new to Lisp. Which later might turn it towards commercial applications.

I tried the no-cost edition, but as it couldn't run my pet project I was working on back then (memory limit), that trial lasted a few minutes and I continued to use SBCL.

I have a fairly large CAPI (UI) example in my Common Lisp book and it runs OK on the free LispWorks edition. The free edition of LispWorks is memory and session time limited, but these limits allow many use cases. The message list for LispWorks contains comments that make me believe that many people use the free edition.

All my experiences with LispWorks come from using the free versions. But basically the first time I tried to use it for real I was trying to run a program I was developing at the time. It used a modest data set of 50 MB and immediately exceeded the limits of the free version. So my tests didn't get far. If I could have paid a modest sum to remove those limits, I would have done it on the spot.

They have a license for hobby users that costs $500 (and $750 for 64 bits). It is not cheap, but it is within reach for people who really want it.

Right. But how many people "really" want it, especially not having used the software? Also considering that there is an excellent free and open source Lisp around: SBCL. The trick is to demonstrate to provide a significant value compared to the free alternatives.

> "predatory proprietary software"

In reality it is a company with a handful of employees in a very small niche market.

In my opinion, Jetbrains has the better model. After all, what happened to JBuilder? Nobody is using it anymore, Codegear/Embarcadero priced themselves out of the competition. Eclipse was free, Netbeans was free, JDeveloper was free, IntelliJ could be had for around 500 bucks and asking price for JBuilder was 4000 or more.

Jetbrains proved that you can successfully can compete against free. But the pricing needs to be reasonable.

Jetbrains seem to be able to compete because they are building for the mass market. JBuilder is an exception. Delphi is a niche product still strongest for fast desktop app development which has a small market compared Rider (C#), PyCharm (Python), IntelliJ (Java), etc. which are all much larger markets.

The pricing was intentional which is different from saying someone "priced themselves out of a market" (which I take to be an unintentional act). They (wrongly) intentionally targeted both an enterprise and niche desktop development segment of the market who are not building mass market apps and could never escape from there because the value of Delphi diminished when Java, and especially C# became mainstream in the early 2000s.

This mistake has more complexity to it when you understand what what going on around Borland and the market in the late 90s. If you are looking at it now, then it just seems like an obvious unforced error.

We use Delphi to develop and maintain a large Windows desktop application.

For that I think it's still pretty darn good.

I recently made a new module for our program, with ~300 input fields including custom search inputs, several grids and multiple 3-layer deep details (head-detail-subdetail). I got the UI elements down in less than two days, and had the whole module ready for initial testing in a less than a month, UI to DB.

This included a lot of smarts, overview/selection views and other custom dialogs, as well as configurable UI defaults like tabstops, required fields, field colors and default values which vary based on current process (think invoice vs credit note).

So yeah, for that kinda stuff it's still pretty great I think. You might want to buy some components, but Delphi itself is expensive so that shouldn't be a huge issue.

For the other platforms I'm less sold.

I've tried FireMonkey, which is their cross-platform UI framework, and it was tedious and the code did not fill me with confidence (3D math library was mixing various concepts etc). They've had some years to work on it since then, maybe things have improved. But you're forever stuck with non-native on all platforms.

The key issue for me is that if you're planning on writing an application with an expected lifetime of 10+ years, like we are, I feel uncomfortable relying on a closed-source tool chain.

Delphi works today, but I don't know where it'll be in 5 years time. I can most likely get it to compile in a VM, worst case, but will it generate the code I need?

The company has quite a different focus than Borland of old, which tried to get their products in as many hands as possible. Many a programmer was weaned on a cheap copy of Turbo Pascal or Turbo-C.

Idera, on the other hand, caters to enterprises. I haven't had a deep look at Delphi in recent years, but if it's the same as ExtJs now (another company bought up by them), I don't see it as a viable option, compared to C# for most small business developers who still need to make UI apps (and on the pure hobbyist end, you've got Lazarus).

I leave the language complaints to the Rust brigade.

Funny you left the complaints to the brigade. I actually found in Rust what I had been missing from Pascal since my Delphi years: a sane, structured system programming language.

Having a Delphi equivalent for Rust would be a dream. The build times are never going to match Pascal's single pass compiler, though.

On the hobbyist end there is also the free community edition of Delphi.

That's the one you can't have on the same computer as the community edition of C++ Builder? Yeah. I've been burned by GPL'd ExtJs, I'm not touching Idera's handouts anymore.

Ask HN: Why Did Pascal Fail?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28490736

2021-09-11 73 points | 163 comments

Unfair competition from Microsoft, that's it.

Top reply on that thread is correct. The brains behind Turbo Pascal took a job at Microsoft and developed .NET and C#. Game over.

As much as I hate Microsoft, I'm not sure that's entirely fair. Borland held the Pascal crown with Turbo Pascal. They introduced Turbo C, but IIRC it never really had the success of Turbo Pascal. Borland was known as the Pascal company, not the C company.

Meanwhile, Microsoft C, the big version, was what everyone used to develop Windows programs in C. It was on the expensive side, like a few hundred bucks I think.

Microsoft came out with Quick Pascal and Quick C, to complement their very-successful QuickBasic product. Quick C was more successful than Borland's Turbo C because Quick C was a hobbyist version of Microsoft C for $99. Microsoft was the C company, Borland was the Pascal company. And C won that argument, not Pascal.

Now it could be said that Microsoft had an advantage because it was easier for them to make Quick C compatible with Microsoft C than it was for Borland to make Turbo C exactly compatible with Microsoft C, especially when all Microsoft had to do was change their C features all the time to keep Borland always playing catch-up.

What MS did to Borland was exactly what they did with Netscape 10 years later: use their dominance of the OS to displace competitors in other areas. The only difference is that computing was a much smaller part of the economy at the time. Things changed with Netscape and other multi-billion dollar web companies, so the government decided to act.

The big difference to me is that with Netscape, Microsoft distributed a free Internet Explorer with Windows just when Netscape was trying to monetize their software. In the case of Borland, Microsoft wasn't distributing free C compilers to compete with Borland's paid compilers.

I think the government decided to act because in the case of the browser, they bundled it with Windows, for free, to kill a competitor. But I agree, having Windows on nearly every desktop in the world gives them a way to launch new products that no other software company enjoys, even to this day, except maybe Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Borland was taken over by managers and did themselves in:

- bought DBase for WAY too much money when flat files DB were on the way out.

- spent lavishly on a new HQ in Mountain View

- renamed themselves to the pompous name of "Inprise"

- suddenly jacked up the price of all their packages so high that their natural user base started looking elsewhere, rather than trying to convince their boss to pay for licences.

...And then came the web, for which they had no product to sell.

Microsoft was only happy to help their downfall by poaching and copying.

I currently work with a licensed C++ Builder, which uses Delphi libraries.

Because of lackluster examples of C++ code, I have to look through Delphi code several times a day on the internet and when I'm debugging.

I guess when you use RAD Studio, it's probably better to go "all in" and use the Delphi language too. I tried C++ Builder once while I was working with Delphi, hoping it will be faster than Visual C++. Little did I know that the slow compile times are "baked in" into C/C++ family languages in ways that are hard to get around, so I was disappointed and went right back to Delphi. The Delphi language is (conceptually, not syntactically) not that different from other classical OO languages like C++ or Java, although it (thankfully in my opinion) doesn't have as many bells and whistles. But of course if you have lots of legacy code in C++ Builder, switching is probably not an option...

I don't really work with any legacy code, because I'm a new hire and build bespoke applications for customers as a one-man-team.

The company I work for has been using Borland since mid-90s, but now I wonder how I should break it to the company that I want to switch to Java.

You might miss the Delphi's AOT compilation though.

There are ways to get it in Java, but other than Graal, they cost just as much.

Sure, it still is a thing.

They can't keep on releasing new versions if nobody is using it :) I use it and stay up-to-date via their subscriptions.

Is it good? Well.. the old VCL stuff is pretty good, very stable, can do pretty much all you want. But that's Windows only.

The multi device framework (FMX aka firemonkey) is getting better, but does sometimes still lack in how mature it is. Normally however you can work around any issue you bump into.

So is it perfect? No, but I'm not aware of a tool that is perfect when you need cross platform development tools.

As far as cost goes (the main complaint I tend to see), it's not very cheap on initial purchase. But with the subscription you basically have a cost of about $500/year for the professional version. Not insurmountable if you consider that they actively work on improving the language and support.

Delphi and other Embarcadero products are still a thing. In Brazil, Delphi was the number 1 platform for several years, and there are still companies maintaining products using this technology. It was cheap at the time (compared to MS offerings) and very easy to use. Given the large number of products released with this platform, I imagine they will be able to stay in the market for a long time.

> Apparently they support iOS,Android,Linux, Windows, MacOS including Apple M1

Last I checked two weeks ago there was no Linux support. I still don't see any mention of Linux support.

Delphi does support Linux: https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Sydney/en/Linux_Ap...

It was initially aimed at server-side apps. Despite what the doc there says, you can also create UI apps through FMXLinux, an addon made available along with Delphi when you buy it.

It's there, but you need an enterprise license...

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