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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the software I really admired in the early 2000s was developed by single persons using Delphi. It seems to me like there is (was?) something promoted by a Delphi environment that is rare to find elsewhere, that lets people (a) quickly prototype cool stuff, and then (b) sustainably grow it into a mature product as it gains users. I wish I cared enough to learn it, but there's so much else I need to learn first!

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The RAD environment makes it insanely quick and easy to throw together a reasonably functional desktop app. Think WinForms on steroids. For all its age and the many cracks and seams, it's still very fast, easy for beginners and pros alike, and the final executable is a single tiny file (usually)

I really find it mind blowing nothing else from what I've seen has really replicated it. Qt does an alright job but everything just seems to take 50% more effort to get it do the same.

WinForms was a decent successor of Delphi, after that gui lib designers dropped the ball completely and eventually got eaten by React.

I am very sad Kylix (the official Delphi for Linux) never went anywhere.

Sadly it was a very lousy port, if I remember correctly instead of properly supporting Linux, they used Wine to make it work, thus it had quite a few issues.

Secondly, it was trying to sell developer tools to a community that rather spend one month coding an alternative than pay regardless if it is a Starbucks XL cappuccino they would be losing.

> if I remember correctly instead of properly supporting Linux, they used Wine to make it work, thus it had quite a few issues

Only the IDE was using wine, the deployed applications were native. But the IDE was a bit annoying because of that.

> Secondly, it was trying to sell developer tools to a community that rather spend one month coding an alternative than pay regardless if it is a Starbucks XL cappuccino they would be losing.

You forget, it was after Borland renamed itself to Inprise and wasted all their cash on UML diagram software and other enterprise stuff. So it's not a Starbucks XL cappucino, it's more like a truckload of those.

Also they sold it separately from Delphi, so you ended up paying twice to do cross platform development. It started at 2 x 1k, i think. So 550 to 600 Starbucks XL cappucinos at 2001 pricing.

Besides Starbucks is overpriced, so maybe 900 great coffees from that noname place you accidentally found out about...

Yes, I am quite aware that Kylix price wasn't a cappuccino XL, however the point was that it would not have helped even if it was, given the prevalent culture.

The first version I used was one of the previews, where the IDE didn't actually work and all the code was compiled from the command line. Kylix 1.0 was "okay", but it quickly became impossible to use because Linux moved on.

The one I thought was bad was the .Net port. Delphi.Net never really got past version 1.0 of the .Net framework because, and this is anecdotal, I heard the compiler abused something in the metadata system that .Net 2.0 no longer allowed and the compiler jus stopped being able to build valid assemblies. They literally wouldn't work anymore because the class loader wouldn't load them under .Net 2.0. If you know anything about .Net, tis is pretty fundamentally poor engineering, because .Net runtimes almost always can load older framework code with the right components installed.

I played with the first, somewhat buggy version and what I remember very vividly was that they introduced a second version (and charged for it) without fixing the first one.

Delphi had a powerful and easy to use GUI editor in the early 2000s, much less of a hassle compared to building software with Windows' own C++ API.

As a kid I remember I was lost in all that OOP, window handles and stuff, and could never do anything. Delphi was like assembling Lego. Very similar to QtCreator.

It was like Visual Basic and Pascal had a baby

It was never clear to me who showed up first, but I used Delphi first and then tried Visual Basic and was like "Oh! It's here too!"

Well if you were familiar with Delphi the VB magic broke when you tried to make your own components for the designer.

I went the same path and it was a bit of a shock when I found out i have to fire up Visual C++ to do a custom VB button.

I remember borrowing a book that had it on a cd, it already had the GUI editor, this must have been around 1997 or so.

Mid 90s rather than early 2000s.

Yeah, but on the other hand Microsoft also offered Visual Basic which was definitely easier to use. The code wasn't as fast, but it wasn't a snail as MS added a compile option (to p-code if I remember correctly) in version 4.0.

Vb 6 got native compilation too

Only to be killed in VB.Net.

It took all these years to have what should be in the box on .NET 1.0 instead of NGEN.

To be honest, VB.Net was a very thin veneer of VB on top of the .Net runtime. It was not good. All of us that were doing Delphi quickly jumped to C#, because it felt a lot more grown up. The only truly terrible products I have worked on after ,Net came on the scene were ones where VB developers decided to use VB.Net to make something "more modern."

Back ~30 years ago, Delphi wasn’t easy compared to Sybase Power++! for example. At that time it was really GUI based efiting

The GUI builder was more powerful than the one provided by VS, from what I remember (20+ years ago since I've dabbled in it). I really miss that era. In certain circles you could open an application and almost get a sense as to who built it due to the craftsmanship / UI / attention to detail in the placement of the elements in the application, etc.

Perhaps a better way to look at it would be to say that Visual Studio had a resource editor UI, basically a frontend to a resource file - that's it.

In contrast, Delphi provided you all the UI code by default, so even if you did not write a single line of code, your program ran and displayed a window or dialog with all the UI elements you could interact with. This was a higher level abstraction (one could argue VS did not even have an abstraction - you still had to code your window procedure from scratch. MFC was the first real attempt at simplifying UI code, but you still had to write code...).

But it did not stop here: it was trivially easy to add a database "connection" to your app (IIRC it was represented by a UI element that was not actually displayed), just provide the connection parameters, connect it to a complex UI element like a table, and voila - you had a live database view within 5 minutes.

Yeah, a lot of non-visual components still require (or want) you to drag-and-drop them in the builder and edit many or most properties there. It's a weird thing to adjust to, and it often leads to a very cluttered view if you have a lot of them. Conversely, a cluttered view with a ton of non-visual components can be a very easy-to-spot signal that you might be trying to do too much in one screen.

Not only has MFC never been at the same level as OWL, unfortunately to this day other than the short lived C++/CX, they never shipped anything comparable to C++ Builder, which shares the RAD tooling with Delphi.

Even doing COM in Delphi/C++ Builder feels more ergonomic than any of Microsoft endless C++ frameworks for COM/WinRT.

I keep a Windows VM for one app that is a commercial Delphi program for embroidery editing. It's been around for 30 years and is on the path to getting cross platform support soon with recent GUI revisions. Always been pretty solid for a product from a small team.

Do ping the Wine folks to make it run; Chances are you'd need almost very few changes to get it to run. Delphi runtime is quite portable.

Delphi is definitely something I'd put up there with LispWorks, a really excellent example of what polished developer experience should optimize for. Even though it's not real live coding like LispWorks, you could see your UI evolve with your classes, without sacrificing drag-and-drop editing, and without having to do it in another language. Everything is seamless, and the libraries are all extremely well thought-out. I think clisp is a nicer language than opascal, but Delphi is still really good software.

A relic from an era where commercial toolchains dominated. Tools for serious corpo Engineers born riding the coked-up excesses of... I think conglomerates were capital's darling at the time?

Which is why nowadays most commercial developer tools are paywalled SaaS products, or access to walled gardens.

Lazarus still exists; but SBCL badly needs an CLIM (MCCLIM better) based GUI REPL for the good (Listener and such, a la Smalltalk). Everyone can just use Emacs/Lem and then for GUI needs, the Listener/Debugger/Viewer interface.

Even before, Turbo Pascal was fairly appreciated in some circles (e.g. demomaking), quite productive and nice to use!

Turbo Pascal was the go to IDE for small commercial apps for quite a few years after its release.

I noticed this as well in the 2000s. Stuff like WinHex which I was pretty sure then was written using Delphi. Was into RE during those days, so I used to poke around the internals of software just for fun

Ran into this quite a bit while working on Wine, too. Start digging into a program's behavior to fix some Wine bug and, "oh, huh, it's another Delphi app."

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