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Comment by FpUser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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