Comment by imagine99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imagine99 | Hacker News Reader

Finally, it's about time that Embarcadero remembers again what used to make Delphi great: Its community! I recently gave Delphi 11 a try again and it is eminently usable for both cross-plattform development and for web and Windows. Built a couple of quick & beautiful apps over a weekend and it got me determined to use Delphi more and more now. It has several ChatGPT plugins available for the IDE which work quite well and speed up development especially for someone like me who is a bit rusty, not having used it for some years. The component ecosystem is amazingly still thriving, with companies like TMS and others offering tons of great (and, for academia, free) ready-to-use components for everything you need these days, from HTML components, full SIP servers, WebView2 integration, SVG support to one-click AWS and Azure integration etc. Such an immense timesaver for anyone wanting to create beautiful GUI apps, too.

I only wish Delphi had a "favorites" filter for the Object Inspector, so you could quickly access your most needed properties without scrolling (that would save so much time when naming a bunch of components, setting captions or adjusting height and width). Never understood why such an obvious and simple feature was never implemented.

The other thing Delphi should really have is a way to "package and export" (or snapshot) the whole Delphi setup, with GUI settings, installed components etc. (similar to how Adobe InDesign lets you package projects with all font files, graphics etc. included), so you can save them along with a project. I find it still a big pain to open an old project on a new machine and having to spend three hours searching and installing components in their latest versions again. Oh well, maybe one day.

Anyway, so great to be able to do Rapid Application Development once again, the latest Delphi is a win, maybe Embarcadero finally saw the light again. Fingers crossed.

1: "I only wish Delphi had a "favorites" filter for the Object Inspector, so you could quickly access your most needed..."

I recommend you install GExperts. It's a free, sources included, nifty utility that greatly improves Delphi IDE.

2: "The other thing Delphi should really have is a way to "package and export" (or snapshot) the whole Delphi setup...." ... "....I find it still a big pain to open an old project on a new machine and having to spend three hours searching and installing components in their latest versions again"

Those are 2 different things. For 1st part, get a docker container / VirtualBox / VMware machine and you can get everything in the snapshot way. I have a VMWare machine from 2007 with Delphi 7 and tons of components from that era, that works like a charm to this day. For 2nd part, to get latest version of components for latest version of Delphi - well, there is a GetIt package manager built in Delphi directly or you can just get the components from their vendors and use their installer. All major Delphi component vendors (TMS, DevExpress, ReportBuilder, etc) have that.

Have fun, I know I do everyday in Delphi. I am a freelancer for 13 years already and 90% of my projects are in Delphi.

I did not know that Pascal is still in use till today. What kind of freelancing projects are in demand? I mean in Delphi/Pascal. If you do not mind my asking.

Anything a business needs. The idea is to actually hunt for a business owner that has problems and they don't care about the programming language you use to solve the problems. When I quote the estimated hours of some application they need in Delphi vs React or C# or whatever other programming language they heard through the vine is good for them, they always choose Delphi. In the end they care about problem solving, not the tech behind.

> I have a VMWare machine from 2007 with Delphi 7 and tons of components from that era, that works like a charm to this day.

I did the same back in 2007 or 2008 after spending 3 days with a consultant setting it up.

Then, before I got a working backup, the external drive that we had it on broke down :-/

Still remember the process:

I hunted source forge, bookshelves, file shares, cabinets and old vendor web sites to find every dependency we needed.

This was around the same time I was introduced to Maven and while it took me a while to fully grasp Maven, once I realized that one small tool could replace this process I was sold.

(To anyone who grew up with Nuget or NPM/Yarn: back you added depencies in Visual Studio the same way as you did in Delphi, by downloading them and double clicking them and clicking next, next, next, accept, next and install. And everyone still knew Javascript was a toy language and didn't need a package manager.)

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