from Hacker News

Delphi still exists and is actively developed

by psim1 on 8/18/22, 12:29 PM with 243 comments

• by magicalhippo on 8/18/22, 3:46 PM

  We use Delphi at work. We've gotten a lot of pressure from customers to move to the web.

  However the lack of ways to design non-trivial UIs quickly does not make it seen feasible at the moment.

  Then there's the fact that Win32 is like bedrock in terms of stability. We've got forms that's been designed and coded over 15 years ago which still works just as fine as they did back then.

  We've got input-heavy UIs, the one I'm working on right now is a single window with >150 input fields including multiple child tables up to levels 3 deep with their own grids. Getting the UI layout done and components connected to the DB will take me a day tops, it'll look great and based on history should work for the next 10+ years. The web seems like such a step back whenever I try it.

• by mhd on 8/18/22, 2:00 PM

  ...for the enterprise. Which is okay, there's plenty of mixed quality software for that sector. It's just that Delphi used to be a lot more oriented towards beginner to small-business developers.

  And note that this happened before the web pillow-smothered decent desktop UIs. If it was all about a reduced audience for desktop-based applications and then supporting that, I would understand it more.

  I haven't been following Delphi itself, but the parent company also manages ExtJS, which is aimed/priced similarly, yet with support/quality that doesn't justify this.

  Weird that outside of the BCPL or ML families, it's Ada that seems to be the one with the most momentum these days.

• by panki27 on 8/18/22, 3:02 PM

  One of the best aspects of Delphi is how quickly you can whip together simple GUI applications. The main issue nowadays is finding helpful resources on the internet, as hardly anybody writes Delphi anymore.

  For the interested, a free Delphi IDE exists (comes with FreePascal compiler): https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

• by kerblang on 8/18/22, 1:54 PM

  I used Delphi years and years ago and it was great for building GUI applications quickly and easily. Much nicer than Visual Basic. I probably wouldn't recognize it now, other than I suppose it's still Object Pascal, which is a very good programming language, all things considered; straightforward, not too fancy, not too dumbed down.

  Free edition: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

• by cosmotic on 8/18/22, 2:17 PM

  I remember one of the great things about delphi was that it statically linked everything into the single .exe making it totally self contained. A Windows GUI program could be a couple hundred KB, no other DLLs required. C/C++ could do the same but you were stuck with nasty raw win32 calls and a lower level language.

• by marcodiego on 8/18/22, 2:35 PM

  I have to repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28491963 :

  My main problem with delphi: it is "too proprietary". It was a very productive ide in the 90's or early 2000's but lost their path and never recovered.

  Some new versions broke compatibility with previous version's components. There was the case where you paid a good amount of money on some proprietary components and they simply wouldn't work in the next version: you were imprisoned in an obsolete ide. By not being multi-platform (I hear it improved it lately) you could only use it with/for win32 so it lost servers, embedded and mobile. By not being open-source nobody could improve it.

  Then it had to compete with "native tools". Whoever develops for windows wouldn't quit ms' tools to use it, whoever develops for mac wouldn't quit apple's tools to use it, whoever develops for android wouldn't quit google's tools to use it, whoever develops for linux was mostly ignored after kylix.

  Note that I didn't even mentioned price and license.

  They improved it later, I heard. But seems more like the old case of too little too late. Most successful programming languages today are open source and multi-platform. Delphi was dependent on win32 for too long and it still is "too proprietary". You do the world a favor by porting your project to lazarus.

• by therealmarv on 8/18/22, 1:55 PM

  I still have the feeling it's the most productive way to create beautiful native Windows desktop programs.

  Rapid application development is not an empty promise here.

  All my other endeavours with UI programming (Java/Swing, HTML/JS frontends, QT) felt way less productive. Maybe MS C# is the closest to Delphi nowadays.

• by RcouF1uZ4gsC on 8/18/22, 1:54 PM

  For me when Borland became Embarcadero, it seemed like it lost it’s scrappy hacker ethos.

  Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Delphi, C++ Builder were all very innovative products that catered to the individual developer. The Embarcadero rebrand seems like a turn towards Enterprise.

  For me now, JetBrains is the new Borland, a scrappy company with a strong focus on what individual developers need and consistently turning out excellent software.

• by minsight on 8/18/22, 2:04 PM

  Embarcadero was acquired by the same jackasses that bought out a company where I used to work. The new owners had a bunch of attitude and kept crowing on about "their playbook". It turned out that the primary technology that they were buying us for was the one part of our product that we actually licensed from another vendor. I believe they spent millions and didn't get what they were looking for.

  They had an offshore team that theoretically could work with the codebase, but I don't remember seeing anything of consequence added to the product in the past 7-8 years. If I ever found that they bought out a company that used technology that I depended upon, I'd migrate to a new solution.

• by mikewarot on 8/18/22, 1:52 PM

  I miss Delphi.... even though I've got it installed.

  I can't bring myself to use it.

  The "free" version has a hook in it that just doesn't sit well with me... they want a cut of any money I make with it, on their terms. It's easier for me to ignore it, and just put up with the limited documentation of Lazarus. I miss the days when I could afford Delphi.

• by jamier1978 on 8/18/22, 6:02 PM

  A significant amount of Delphi code I wrote 20+ years ago is still in the wild and still making a ton of money for a company I used to work for.

  I actually miss the days of Windows desktop development. Good Times.

• by LorenPechtel on 8/19/22, 5:47 PM

  So what if it does?

  In the old days I loved them. Then I found myself using older versions despite having newer ones because of important bugs.

  Then came 64 bit code. They were years late in releasing a compiler that could produce 64 bit code and the reaction from the company seemed to be that it's a tiny portion of the users that need it.

  Never mind that for that not-so-tiny portion (you might have no direct need of 64 bit address space but if you have to play nice with 64 bit code you have to be 64 bit--plugins) it was a total showstopper, companies relying on it were dead in the water, had to to a total rewrite or die.

  I got the strong feeling that they were looking at us customers as a resource to be milked, not supported. My employer at the time died in the housing collapse, while I still have a couple of little Delphi apps around that I wrote I haven't touched it since then. C# was almost as good (and at this point all that's missing are arrays with an enum index and arrays that don't start at zero) and has much better support.

• by runjake on 8/18/22, 3:48 PM

  Similarly, Windows Forms[1] still exists and is still being developed. Yeah, it was "deprecated" by Microsoft[2], but it's since been "un-deprecated".

  Windows Forms is C# and borrows heavily from Delphi's Rapid Application Development (RAD) style.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Forms

  2. http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/WPF-QA

• by hankman86 on 8/18/22, 10:47 PM

  I still have a warm spot in my heart for Delphi. When I bought a license for Delphi 1.0 running on Windows 3.1, it was like a revelation to me. Having previously used Borland Pascal on DOS, I found it unbelievable how easy developing Windows UIs can be. I developed a 16-bit business app (accounting, inventory management, customer records) on Delphi 1.0 which is still running today (you need a 32 bit version of Windows 7 though). The bundled Borland Database Engine (Paradox desktop) was decent enough for structured data management in a single-user application. The best feature was the compiler that sprinted through my source code, turning it into a statically linked executable in mere seconds (on a Pentium 60).

  While I have long moved on from Pascal, many great ideas of Delphi live on in C# and Typescript.

• by 29athrowaway on 8/18/22, 4:50 PM

  If you want Delphi to succeed you have to win the developers.

  The Embarcadero website experience for a developer is nonsense. The first thing you see in the page is "BUY NOW", "FREE TRIAL". It's so aggressive that my instant reaction is to close the product page before I even get to see what the product is about.

  And no, I don't want a "product demo". I don't want to contact sales. I am a developer I don't care about that. "Contact sales"/"Request a product demo" sounds intimidating. It sounds like you want me to spend $5000, which I am not willing to spend.

  My primary objective as a developer is to develop applications. The website has to focus on assisting that process.

• by scrapcode on 8/18/22, 3:14 PM

  I have fond memories of using Borland's Delphi when I was a much younger boy. GUI building tools such as Delphi, VS, JavaFX and the old Dreamweaver really helped certain concepts click for me at that age.

• by archielc on 8/18/22, 4:51 PM

  I used Borland Delphi (as well as C++ Builder for some period) throughout my university times for all kinds of home works and hobby apps. It was extremely easy to build simple but still good-looking UIs. At some point I even had a small reusable library for graph problems (add/edit nodes/edges with nice arrows/labels etc.) What I really liked was how fast you could get to real coding part with minimum boilerplate. Happy to see Lazarus IDE still having a strong community.

• by lord-squirrel on 8/18/22, 3:15 PM

  Denmark's farming industry's ERP system run on a system called Ø90 which is written delphi, java and cobol. Still being actively maintained by IBM today.

• by cowmix on 8/18/22, 3:01 PM

  I remember going to a convention in 2005 for retail store software and I was amazed that Delphi dominated as the platform for POS systems.

• by aaa_aaa on 8/18/22, 2:43 PM

  AFAIK they signed a deal with education ministry of Turkey so that Delphi will be taught as the programming language in technical high schools.

• by jollyllama on 8/18/22, 12:50 PM

  I remember, as a kid, looking up examples of malware. Bots and trojans and such. Invariably, much of it was in Delphi. Why was this so?

• by crypt1d on 8/18/22, 1:54 PM

  I'd love to go back to Delphi and play with it again as I did back in the day, but the price tag kills the mood pretty quickly.

• by Kaibeezy on 8/18/22, 9:49 PM

  Editorialized title. It really does detract from the discussion. Let us reach our own judgments. Or am I missing something?

• by shimonabi on 8/18/22, 2:29 PM

  I'm working with the Delphi libraries every day in C++ Builder, bucause my company bet on Turbo C++ and Builder in the 90s, when Microsoft technologies seemed primitive compared to it.

  At a recent meetup in my country, 90% of Delphi developers were over 60 years old. Also, Embarcadero licenses aren't cheap.

• by giancarlostoro on 8/18/22, 1:56 PM

  It does still exist, and I'd love to try it out, but I'm not throwing down thousands of dollars when it costs significantly less for me to get Visual Studio Pro as a single developer ($30 a month iirc) or you know... $120 for JetBrains IDE's annually (after 3 years) it makes no sense for me to throw down a thousand dollars (per year?) same with you Qt. I'm looking to evaluate your product and prototype and maybe build small projects that need a UI but your pricing scheme is not for people like me at all.

  One would likely argue that JetBrains probably isnt a RAD IDE, but Visual Studio definitely is fully capable of RAD editing capabilities, think WinForms.

• by unpeasant on 8/19/22, 12:12 PM

  Went for a job interview last year and the tech stack was an API built in Delphi, on Macs, using a virtual machine running Windows.

  Company was doing well from it, but trying to scale, and finding anyone to code delphi was impossible.

• by omgmajk on 8/18/22, 2:17 PM

  I have used Lazarus in the last year, it's very ugly but it gets the job done.

• by kaba0 on 8/18/22, 4:13 PM

  Could someone please explain/describe how GUI creation was done with Delphi? I tried to look up a video/wiki page but I don’t see what kind of abstraction did it use and why was it as liked?

• by marcodiego on 8/18/22, 2:56 PM

  The linked page may be a snapashot of what delphi became: the video autoplays; controls disappear spontaneously with no obvious way to bring them back; most of the initial time in the video is spent showing the welcome screen: you can now set the background image and theme!; it has lots of text in the form of images, one of these says "Support for 4k+ Screens. Welcome to the future!"; the download button puts you in a page where you have to enter a lot of personal information and prove your are not a robot.

• by VikingCoder on 8/18/22, 3:28 PM

  Delphi was great, until C# and WinForms came along. Then there was honestly no reason for me to use Delphi again. All the other UI junk in Visual Studio is terrible in comparison, for me.

• by KingOfCoders on 8/18/22, 1:54 PM

  Only the best memories for Delphi.

• by elzbardico on 8/18/22, 7:44 PM

  Borland was just another example of Death-By-MBA.

• by unixhero on 8/18/22, 3:00 PM

  Both Embarcadero.com and Lazarus project homepage refers to that they have the capability of RAD.

  Lazarus - "RAD - Rapid Application Development." Embarcadero - "RAD Server - Reduces the complexities of rapidly building and deploying a multi-tier turn-key enterprise REST API application server with Swagger support."

  What does RAD refer to? What is it actually?

• by kaiken1987 on 8/18/22, 3:05 PM

  Delphi and it's components are still nice. But their C++Builder seems like if just keeps getting worse. Instead of maintaining the Borland compiler and debugger they've been replacing it with new ones that work about a quarter as well.

• by nottorp on 8/18/22, 3:22 PM

  It may exist but at that price tag only large companies with legacy applications will keep using it.

• by badrabbit on 8/18/22, 5:23 PM

  For the unaware delphi packers are somewhat popular with malware authors.

• by Double_a_92 on 8/18/22, 5:14 PM

  If only debugging worked properly, especially in 64bit applications...

• by kokizzu2 on 8/19/22, 5:44 AM

  US$ 1,599 XD not using windows, delphi, c++ anymore so, no..

• by bena on 8/18/22, 3:10 PM

  Wow. It looks just like Visual Studio... 6.

  I have fond memories of Pascal, it's the language of the first programming class I took.

  But yeah. The website and the screenshots do not inspire confidence.

• by pipeline_peak on 8/18/22, 2:22 PM

  You know a modern company is active when there’s a photo of a black lady with natural hair holding a laptop by a server room.