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Comment by msh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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