Delphi is 31 years old – innovation timeline | Hacker News Reader

Delphi is 31 years old – innovation timeline

blogs.embarcadero.com

63 pointsandsoitis38 comments

I started using Delphi 3 and stopped at 7, migrating to web development (Rails, Django, etc.).

Delphi was magical. Nothing compares to Delphi's productivity. Rails is good, but it doesn't even come close to Delphi's productivity. People love Go's speed. Go is glacially slow compared to Delphi. The WYSIWYG form editor is incredible. I can use Delphi 3 on a Windows machine with 16 MB of RAM.

VCL is fantastic; the idea of components and memory management is incredible, simple, and it works.

Delphi is my first language; I studied VCL code and I love the code, the style. They were practical: Instead of Hash, they used TStrings (a list of strings) and the visual components also used them, like in the items of a Listbox!

Delphi could have been the platform for the web. Imagine a VCL for the web (VCLW), where you could change the target architecture or something like that and, presto, you'd have a web server running with VCL code!

That never happened. What happened was a series of bad ideas for the web, bad in their essence.

And Delphi invested in many projects doomed to failure, such as CORBA, three-tier architecture, MDA... Kylix!!!! Of course, Borland was very poorly managed. The CEOs were crazy. "Let's fight IBM." Delphi was abandoned. It's over.

I tried a new version of Delphi a few years ago. Wow, it was full of bugs! It had basic problems like compilation not working, Random crashing several times, etc. For me the new versions are just a way to profit from projects stuck in Delphi.

I tried Lazarus in the past, but it's extremely slow and I can't use my components in Lazarus without rewriting a lot of things.

To me, Delphi is languishing in an induced coma, breathing the air of the past, which is becoming increasingly rare. It's a shame.

This so much.

We just got code complete on porting a 30 year old Delphi app to C#, because of all of this.

Even now, our pure Delphi components are performant and wonderful, but hiring people who want to learn or know Delphi is hard, so off to C# we trundle forward.

Didn't the same people who wrote Delphi write also C# and .NET? When I first saw .NET it felt very much like VCL/CLX. And then came TypeScript from the same guy.

But then the C# people make writing code in it.. a horrible experience. They really like to over engineer and architect.

Had to look at some c# backend code. To write any kind of endpoint that talked to a database they had to write at least... 7? different files, lots of empty interfaces that has to be created and implemented, command, mediator patterns everywhere, etc. Looked like insanity compared to Spring Boot

You know things are bad when someone compares something to Spring and says: "this is thing is more complicated!".

> Had to look at some c# backend code. To write any kind of endpoint that talked to a database they had to write at least... 7? different files, lots of empty interfaces that has to be created and implemented, command, mediator patterns everywhere, etc. Looked like insanity compared to Spring Boot

Programming against interfaces. That's what you are seeing. Makes unit testing easier.

Somehow it is not required in other languages. It hurt our eyes at the office when looking at all these empty meaningless interface files. It just looks like bad language design from the outside, but when you are in there then you are used to all the weird things

You can have it as short as you want. For example check this minimal API

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/min-...

—

But if you want it to be mockable, concerns-separated and what have you, you’ll end up with at least 3-5 files. But it ain’t got nothing to do with either C# or .NET in general.

As much as I know the story MSFT was basically driving limousines in front of Borland headquarters and showering developers with money to jump the ship.

When web apps took off there was nothing that would save Delphi. Web stack was awful back then and I also enjoyed Delphi an building interfaces with it.

But web stack unfortunately had many more upsides than desktop apps and nowadays tooling for web sucks less.

As someone who used delphi professionally for years, it feels like we lived in parallel universes.

> you'd have a web server running with VCL code!

Is this for real? Unigui has been around for over a decade. I've ported legacy vcl apps to web with it. Works with apache as well.

What's your grudge with kylix? Again, I've used it to deploy server side code, worked great as a data provider for visual components and as an http endpoint. No idea why anyone thought it was bad. The only problem was it being discontinued. But nobody at the time thought it was doomed or would be discontinued.

> tried Lazarus in the past, but it's extremely slow

No, fpc builds, optimizes and runs exactly like delphi. The problem with Lazarus is it is missing commercial tools like devexpress.

Also Lazarus had compiler bugs on arm32 which prevented us from using it in professional barcode readers.

And the whole recompiling your ide every time you added a new control got old fast.

So it is unused for entirely different reasons. I can't think of anything else that is bad about Lazarus.

> tried a new version of Delphi a few years ago. Wow, it was full of bugs! It had basic problems like compilation not working, Random crashing several times

From someone who used "new delphi" for years this part feels like it was made up on the spot! If you have a crash, it is usually you doing something wrong with your controls.

And the way to fix it is to run another delphi ide, attach your delphi ide instance to the debugger and find the point your stupid mistake crashed the ide. Takes 5 minutes.

Edit: Note to the uninitiated: the reason a control (a gui element) can crash the IDE is because of Delphi s design time. That allows you to view and use the control while designing the interface.

> Unigui has been around for over a decade

Is it possible to take a VCL project, change some configuration, and turn it into a web server? Unigui is similar to Intraweb, isn't it? You need to recreate the project as a Unigui/Intraweb project.

> No, fpc builds, optimizes, and runs exactly like Delphi

It's not my experience. As an example: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,4958

> for years, this part feels like it was made up on the spot!If you have a crash, it is usually you doing something wrong with your controls.

No, I remember the event exactly. I saw a post about the community edition here, filled out the Embarcadero form, and downloaded it. No anything added to Delphi. And I had a bad experience with it.

I love Delphi. The best days of my life as a developer were spent using Delphi. But this does not solve the problems that Delphi and Embarcadero face.

Sometimes I miss the times where you had a compact development environment, wit one installer. Your source produced a mostly self contained binary in a reasonable size, you had nice debugging support and quick turnaround times for a compiled language even on a small development machines. And all that for attractive price for a perpetual license (Borland times).

Today it seems I have to give the producer my email address for the 'free' "Delphi History PDF". Well, times have changed. :)

npm i nostalgia

For me Go and Rust match this to a point. Especially Go once installed it generates executable extremely fast.

Yeah, no. None of those have built in debuggers, for example. I also doubt Rust compilation is fast on slow computers.

> I have to give the producer my email address for the 'free' "Delphi History PDF"

Yeah I was interested to see the timeline but I'm not going through a spam wall to get it.

I have very fond memories of working with Delphi 5 and 2005 in the early 2000s. Both the language and IDE were a real pleasure to work with, and they were head and shoulders better than anything from Microsoft at that time. The community was small but enthusiastic and supportive as well.

It would be hard to justify Delphi in a new project today - not because of the tooling or language, but because of the prohibitive license costs.

Same here, but with C++Builder.

My dad taught me how to code with Borland C++ Builder, and I'm forever grateful.

The way I saw it in 1995 was that Delphi was the fastest way to create a full windows desktop app and do it as single compiled-to-native-code executable at that critical time it was released. The slightly-later 32-bit version was powerful and gave your app some staying power; a Delphi-generated executable file would likely still run today.

Sadly they still do, although finding somebody to work on them is hard and while the executables work, the dev environment does not. Delphi was a pretty nasty dead end

When I was a kid, my older brother worked for Borland. He got me 2 packs of stickers that said "Delphi developers do it better!!!" in red font and a yellow background.

The original borland delphi had very creative installer graphics:

https://www.gladir.com/SOFTWARE/DELPHI1/delphi1-install5.png

That was before Delphi 2.0 even :)

The programmers must have been playing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Drive_(1987_video_game)

Good memories. I moved from Turbo Pascal to Delphi 1.0 when it came out. I used them all through Delphi 5.0 Enterprise. Then moved on to Java 1.1 (which felt like a step backward at the time).

When I was starting out as a kid learning to make applications, moving from VB6 to Delphi was such a huge improvement.

Tempted to use a client's plotter and roll of paper to print this off.

I remember taking an onsite class to learn Delphi. The class was taught in St Petersburg Florida. Nice place. At the time, I was admiring the tool that Borland created and thought to myself this is a very nice IDE. Too bad my company was switching to all things .Net. The difference between Visual Studio and the Delphi IDE was gut wrenching.

Weird but FreePascal is fairly solid for its niche.

My memory is fuzzy, but as for me, Delphi died the day it suddenly became too expensive for hobbyists and students, and I couldn't justify spending more on Delphi than on a brand new PC at that time. Borland sold it away and we saw price up in the thousands of dollars for a single license. When the free community edition came out, it was a decade too late. I also miss dBase, as it was far superior to MS foxpro or Access.

Creating a simple application that had a database backend, data presentation gui and some simple CRUD logic took like 15-30 mins. All from scratch. How does it compare to today’s tools? And I am not talking about taking some ready off the shelf solution that you don’t really understand internally…

Those were good times and I really regret all those mishaps that happened to this great ecosystem and its eventual collapse :(

Happy birthday Delphi, you made me a lot of money :-)

I am guessing most Delphi developers like me, have either retired or have moved to Linux. I have done both recently and I unfortunately do not see a new generation following in behind me. I hope it survives as it was and still is a nice IDE and language to work in, though I'm guessing newer Pascal developers will opt for Lazarus

I wrote a trojan (for educational purposes) in Delphi by studying another one for which I had the source code. The original was called Donald Duck.

Then I wrote back-office software in Delphi that ran for 15+ years without any maintenance or support.

Those were simpler times.

Is it still alive? Last time I used it was around 2005.

One nice thing though as I remember was that ruins of Russian Borland branch gave us Jetbrains.

Straight up, nobody uses it anymore.

What is dead may never die

I'm now retired, but I spent much (most?) of my career developing with Delphi. When I began, it was the new hotness. When I finished, I was supporting legacy applications that were decades old. Good to see it's still around, though.

31 years old and it can't run on GNU/Linux. What a waste. The future of Delphi is darker than ever.

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