According Embarcadero's website Delphi XE5 offers all the same plus Android support: http://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi, http://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder. If they're targeting mobile developers I wonder why Embarcadero hasn't released a cheap "indie" version of Delphi yet. Last I checked it had much better compile times than C++Builder and the language itself could easily be marketed as a "friendlier C++". Meanwhile, outside of some larger companies where it's entrenched Delphi's popularity is waning.
>If you’re an individual you may use the Starter Edition to create apps for your own use and apps that you can sell until your revenues reach $1,000 per year. If you’re a small company or organization without revenue (or up to $1,000 per year in revenue), you can also use the Starter Edition. Once your company's total revenue reaches US $1,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, move up to the Professional edition with an unrestricted commercial license.
The upgrade from Starter to Professional costs $899.00.
They really, really wanted to become an "enterprise" company. They acquired certain management people who saw development tools as a dead end, and decided all the money was in the enterprise.
But they misjudged the market, and invested in products like Visibroker and Midas (and dead-end tech like CORBA), not really understanding what they ought to be building.
(This wasn't the beginning of their troubles, though. They bungled a lot of decisions before then, especially with the purchase of dBase and Paradox, and the Windows version of Quattro Pro.)
I stopped using Delphi in the late 1990s, but even then I could see how it was heading towards obsolescence. Not the GUI development model itself, which was brilliant and which I sorely miss for OS X GUI development today, but Object Pascal.
Sure, Object Pascal is a good language, but it was very insular, not portable, often very Windows-specific, didn't integrate well with other things, and didn't evolve fast enough. I was able to work with C and C++ libraries, including Dialogic hardware APIs and Microsoft tech such as MAPI and TAPI, by writing a translator (htrans) that parsed header files into an AST and produced Object Pascal interface files for them. But it was very tiring. I had high hopes for C++Builder, but it was a major disappointment when it arrived. For one, it relied on a lot of proprietary C++ extensions.
I was using Delphi/Object Pascal for a lot a systems development, non-GUI backend stuff. It seems a bit quixotic today, but it was fun, and I liked the language. It sort of filled a particular niche that Java would overtake a few years later.
Thanks for sharing your experience, very interesting.
I left the ecosystem around Delphi 1.0, when I started to be more focused on UNIX at the university and only had p2c available. :(
For me C++ has the way out as it provided many of the language capabilities that Object Pascal also had.
Like many C++ early adopters, I also created my own set of classes (vector, string, lists) that insulated me from the unsafe C world as most as possible.
Due to its ubiquity, C++ is my language to go for native coding, but I hope one day it gets replaced by Rust, D, Nimrod or any other safer systems programming language.
It's a curious thing, technology exposure and ending up using — and being limited by — what you know exists.
I remember getting an Amiga in the early 1990s. I had programmed in assembly language on the C64, so on the Amiga I learned the Motorola 68000 assembly language, of course. I didn't know any other type of programming (other than BASIC). I had heard about C, but I didn't know people used it to write software on the Amiga. I remember buying a book about Intuition (the AmigaOS windowing system) and trying to figure out how to call the APIs from assembly language, which was of course fruitless, as I didn't even know how about the concept of linking, let alone how to look up library functions from assembly. Nobody had told me about C!
So I was a Windows person in the 1990s because that was the thing people used at home, and it was natural for me to use Delphi, not C++. I had looked at C++, but the possibility of using C++ for my projects never really struck me. Delphi was such a phenomenally productive tool. Windows seemed like the only viable platform. A lot of people are exposed to UNIX in university, but I didn't go there, so my first taste of UNIX was (aside from Amiga) Linux.
I agree with you about C++. I've had fun writing Go, but it feels like a stopgap solution until the real next-level language appears. Rust, maybe. Nimrod does look cool.
What you're saying rings true to me. I also learned Borland/Turbo/Object Pascal first (perhaps somewhat unusually, I went from Borland Pascal to C++ to Delphi when learning to program as a kid). Although I can't say I never liked C there are many things about Object Pascal I found superior that I miss in C, especially the built-in string type (for those who haven't used it, in C-land it can be compared to bstrings but it's handled completely transparently).
If you wanted to use Object Pascal today and not have to rely on Embarcadero for the continued support of your tools you could use Free Pascal and Lazarus, which are both free software (GPL-licensed). Unfortunately, there's bit of a stigma against using any variant of Pascal these days (to which, no doubt, the many crappy CRUD apps written in Delphi and Borland's management of their product have both contributed), so it's not a good choice for new projects, especially free and open source. I wonder if Nimrod could be the comeback of type-safe compiled languages that don't target the JVM.
Nimrod does indeed look very much inspired by Object Pascal (it even uses the classic Borland "T" and "P" prefixes for types and pointers, respectively, something I honestly never liked).
Object Pascal was a fine language, but I don't see the point of using it today, not without removing a lot of the historical Pascal warts (begin/end, the weird semicolon rules, somewhat poor integration with C, etc.), and then you pretty much end up with Java.
I loved it too. I moved to "C" because of one missing function in Pascal (and as I would say now - it's runtime library) - "movefile" - e.g. moving file from one directory to another.
Also someone was spreading rumours that all games were written in C/C++ so we had to move to it :)
When I learned assembly, and got my Ralph Brown's interrupt list (best thing ever back in the days) I went back to Pascal and made little assembly function for "movefile".
I remmember friend of mine, who just moved to "C" put all his code in the .h file - and it was compiling all the time. Back then having .TPU file and not having to write additional header file was very advanced compared to C/C++ - and the compilation times were much faster.
I used to use Borland's products in a job. They used C++ Builder 6 and migrated their code to the later compiler, Codegear 2007 and it was truly dire (6 was alright). It was exceptionally buggy, the linker continually crashed, and the help system took 14 hours to install (not an exaggeration). The VCL had difficulty with manifests and proper theming on XP and above I think (particularly tab pages) and it desperately needed fixing / replacing. The company tested the version after 2007 and it would compile illegal C++.
I think after they spent years developing C++ Architect and then chucking it in the bin, many of the developers jumped ship and Borland was left with few developers, a shell of its former self. They also had stupid products like their PHP IDE (I wonder how many they actually sold???) and as far as I know the company I used to work for is still making software using the creaking aging VCL! A large code base to rewrite is no fun!
A shame for Borland (or whatever they are called these days) but I am not inclined to buy this software.
Embarcadero C++Builder is the successor to Borland's Turbo C. It has changed names several times, having been marketed under the brands Borland, Inprise, CodeGear, and Embarcadero.
Makes me wonder if they should not bring the old Borland name (or even Turbo). That'll resonate at least with a lot more older developers (that might be managers now).
I stared with programming with TURBO.COM (Turbo Pascal 3.0) - it was 33kb DOS executable and had built-in editor - fit on a diskette, and there was space for other things.
I skipped version 4 (Turbo/Borland Pascal) and had most fun with 5.0 and 5.5, then 6.0 was solid, and later it was the last time I've used Borland products - the first Delphi and that was it.
Turbo Vision (Borland's GUI for Text Mode - e.g. DOS) was very advanced. I've briefly tried OWL (C/C++ I think) - but had to move onto other things.
Then Delphi was very easy to build interfaces, and later when Microsoft snatched Anders Hejlsberg it kind of resurfaced in Microsoft's products. For example MFC's GUI editing was much worse (and still is) than whatever Delphi had 15 or more years ago (my opinion, I know too many MFC fans out there, and surely they still love it).
The biggest issue C++Builder has for me is that it is pretty damn expensive considering Xcode is included as part of OS X. The Professional version is £850 and still requires the extra purchase of the Mobile Add-on pack which is an extra £423! That makes the total cost £1273!! I would rather pay less and buy a Macbook Air which comes with Xcode.
Yeah I am talking about individuals. I guess I am not their target customer though. Obviously to big companies a few thousand is nothing (especially when you look at >$10k for MSDN Ultimate) but Embarcadero have zero products aimed towards the individual developer (not even the Starter Edition is worth it as it is so limited for the price).
Yeah I can't remember the last place I saw running any Borland/Embarcadero software with the exception of some really old stuff still compiled with C++Builder6. That place was also running Visual Studio 6 for some stuff too :) Ahh the memories.
Delphi 3 was the first program that I pay for (second was visual foxpro). Obviously, at US99 a student like me could do it. I'm moderator in the http://www.clubdelphi.com and is sad to see all the same faces all the time. New blood is hard to get, specially in latin america, when .NET is affordable/free and all the open source stuff.
Is sad that the misguided strategy that start with the Borland has pass up to Embarcadero. Where they must look for broad appeal they decide to milk instead :(. Delphi was huge (Delphi 3 - 5) and if they have more critical mass now will be a powerful force. The worst? Delphi is SOOOO good that have survived despite all the problems so far.
Still, Delphi + Python are my favorites languages of all the time...
Delphi back in the late 90s was kick ass. Nothing could touch it for desktop application development in my opinion. The people who forced themselves to use MFC and C++ on Windows were missing out big time on the ease of use of Delphi and VCL. It wasn't until C# and .NET that things got to the same ease of development as I was used to with Delphi.
here's what most cross-platform library vendors never get: it's actually easier, and ultimately faster, to learn each environment's native API, then learn one cross-platform API and all of the idiosyncrasies on each platform it supports. Inevitably, there will be some aspect of the native platform that doesn't work correctly within the x-platform sdk and then you have to hack around it.
Edit: Now that I've looked at their online store through a US proxy I see that they have: https://store.embarcadero.com/542/catalog/product.s3703/lang.... Not that the conditions are very good:
>If you’re an individual you may use the Starter Edition to create apps for your own use and apps that you can sell until your revenues reach $1,000 per year. If you’re a small company or organization without revenue (or up to $1,000 per year in revenue), you can also use the Starter Edition. Once your company's total revenue reaches US $1,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, move up to the Professional edition with an unrestricted commercial license.
The upgrade from Starter to Professional costs $899.00.