Like so many other programmers of a certain age, I cut my teeth on Borland IDEs in the late 90s, building software for Windows 9x, which was a time when Borland was absolutely crushing it with tools that were light years ahead of Microsoft's own offerings at the time.
It makes me so sad that Borland tools are squarely in the dustbin of history, and are now maintained almost exclusively for legacy customers. I would love to read some kind of retrospective (a book, a series of blogs, etc) on the downfall of Borland and what exact business circumstances led to its irrelevance.
There's always Lazarus, a more or less Delphi clone. Being open-source, it's harder for a greedy or incompetent vendor to yank the carpet out from under your org.
I've considered abandoning web-dev for Delphi/Lazarus. The web is a lousy fit for CRUD/GUI. React etc. are Spruce Gooses. (We need a dynamic over-http markup standard, kind of like a friendlier and XML version of QML.)
I’m considering this too. I tried writing some test using react testing library and jest, but in order to debug my test and see actual html that the test was rendering, turns out you either have to log the output or use jest-preview which is in alpha to say the least. Documentation, getting started… all of it is so immature and working half-ways that I can’t help but wonder what are we doing with our lives?
As someone who got started with Delphi 2.0, I can tell you what killed it for me: the release of .net and visual studio. I looked back a few times, but always went back to visual studio.
That isn't how it went down, Anders got fed up with Borland management and decided to finally accept the offers from ex-Borland folks to join Microsoft.
When he joined, his first project was being part of J++.
I have read that quite often here and there and while the management at Borland certainly was a pain, I don’t think that for Anders Hejlsberg this was the main reason to leave.
I believe (and I have no prove) that during development of Delphi V1.0 Anders realized that his „baby", the source code of the compiler core written in 16-bit assembly became worthless. The new 32-bit compiler for Delphi V2.0 was written in C by Peter Sollich.
Anders new role at Borland was just to be an architect / manager / teamleader / whatever… He could have contributed to the new 32-bit compiler in a way he does today to TypeScript, but for whatever reason he didn’t wanted to. That, along with the Borland management and the nice $$$ signing bonus offered at Microsoft made him leave. Again, that's just my take.
Peter Sollich left Borland I think in 1998 in order to join Microsoft, to this day he is in the C#/.net team.
https://youtu.be/LPcjSdob9AA
And I still wonder who has written Turbo Pascal for Mac in 1985/86…
No. It wasn't Linux, it was web applications that did Delphi in commercially. GUI desktop software was suddenly unpopular and web applications were all the rage because OMG! just go live! No upgrade and multi-platform InstallShield build to deal with.
My first serious language was Turbo Pascal 3.0. When Delphi came out, I jumped on board. My first programming job was as a Delphi programmer, starting with Delphi 1, switching to Java after Delphi 5 Enterprise. Delphi, and even C++ Builder were IDEs geared toward producing desktop client-server applications. If you were building web apps Java was the place to be.
Kylix never mattered, because Linux desktop applications didn't matter, generally speaking, so it never became profitable. Linux as an alternative to Solaris on servers was a huge deal though, and is now nearly ubiquitous. But again, Delphi came very late to the web application game.
That was exactly it… Plus their clumsy rebranding over and over, changing licensing terms that stopped non-enterprise users from adopting, and the CS educators adopting Java and dropping Pascal… They tried to use Delphi as a cash cow when they needed innovation…
One of my early professional 'whoops' was with Delphi. We delivered a client (server) application that was sent out on like 20 floppy disks. I misspelled Pharmaceutical, which was part of the company name, on the splash screen. We had a lot of 'junk' floppies floating around the office after that.
The way the web changed customer facing software was amazing at the time.
True, and on a global scale 20% is even a much larger percentage than I would have expected.
My point however is that when I started working in IT I was the only one at the places where I worked who used something other than Windows whenever possible and also advocated for it.
Then there was a change. And as far as I can see that change started with screencasting and as far as I saw, the first widely popular screencasts that existed was Rails, created mostly by 37 Signals (now Basecamp I guess) and other Rails devs/enthusiasts.
I might be wrong about this but I feel fairly certain these guys drove a lot of the change in peoples and organisations attitude to alternative OSes.
Also: for a long time it seemed Linux adoption was also lower in less wealthy countries as using unlicensed versions of Windows are much more accepted there.
I would say that its adoption was mainly driven by iOS development, the meme of Year of Desktop Linux hardly coming true as the desktop story keeps being rebooted every couple of years, and the fact that many folks don't really care about GNU/Linux per se, any POSIX environment will do just fine.
As it turns out, the remaining 78% users (taking out the usual 2% from Steam surveys) that cared about POSIX tooling, were happy to use SUA, cygwin, mingw, Virtual Box, VMWare for their needs, and now have WSL in the box anyway.
Borland released a Delphi compiler for Linux in the late 90s named Kylix, discontinued in 2011. However, it was not successful for a number of reasons, notably that there were better, free IDEs available, there were many compiler errors, and poor integration with GDB. For this reason, developers found it frustrating to use, and it had poor uptake. Even so, Borland had spent so much trying to make Kylix work that it contributed significantly to the company's ultimate collapse.
I cut my teeth on Delphi and I don’t remember Linux ever coming up despite me using it quite a bit. Delphi’s bug strength was the really polished UI builder. The language itself was almost secondary to that. But the UI builder was married to Windows UI and I don’t honestly know how well it might have been translated to something like GTK or QT. Also in the early 2000s both GTK and QT were going through some major changes and so were moving targets.
Besides, the early 2000s were the era of the “this is the year of Desktop Linux” tech articles. Of course that never materialized and Linux desktop is still pretty niche. So I don’t really see how lack of Linux support had anything to do with it.
More than this: Borland underestimated the role of web apps, and bet that enterprise users would never move from native client server apps to web apps.
They weren't the only ones making this mistake at the time.
I remember having a "ruh-oh!" moment when a junior dev showed me his latest DHTML web page that did something we'd previously been doing in VB. The sudden realisation that this was significant and I'd better get on with learning it or be left behind was painful. The urge to continue dismissing the web as a good information source but not somewhere you did things was strong.
Crappy features - features that developers didn't want and didn't need. Management driven? The headline features on every release were just rubbish that you didn't care about or never used - very few headline features held up over time. This started in Turbo Pascal days - remember OWL?
Of course they were struggling to compete with Gorilla Microsoft, but Delphi had a huge community, commercial components, and most components were source available (C# was wayyyy behind on that I thought).
Borland fucked up, and after that it was dead and sold. 64-bit super was released years late, and the IDE still ran 32-bit (slow and crashy on high-end machines).
I would summarise it as lack of 'taste' for what developers want. Microsoft later followed the same path: Microsoft had the intense love of many developers but has squandered that love over the years. Balmer's "developers, developers, developers" rant was actually brilliant (a perhaps is why it is so memorable).
Finally, it's about time that Embarcadero remembers again what used to make Delphi great: Its community! I recently gave Delphi 11 a try again and it is eminently usable for both cross-plattform development and for web and Windows.
Built a couple of quick & beautiful apps over a weekend and it got me determined to use Delphi more and more now. It has several ChatGPT plugins available for the IDE which work quite well and speed up development especially for someone like me who is a bit rusty, not having used it for some years. The component ecosystem is amazingly still thriving, with companies like TMS and others offering tons of great (and, for academia, free) ready-to-use components for everything you need these days, from HTML components, full SIP servers, WebView2 integration, SVG support to one-click AWS and Azure integration etc. Such an immense timesaver for anyone wanting to create beautiful GUI apps, too.
I only wish Delphi had a "favorites" filter for the Object Inspector, so you could quickly access your most needed properties without scrolling (that would save so much time when naming a bunch of components, setting captions or adjusting height and width). Never understood why such an obvious and simple feature was never implemented.
The other thing Delphi should really have is a way to "package and export" (or snapshot) the whole Delphi setup, with GUI settings, installed components etc. (similar to how Adobe InDesign lets you package projects with all font files, graphics etc. included), so you can save them along with a project. I find it still a big pain to open an old project on a new machine and having to spend three hours searching and installing components in their latest versions again. Oh well, maybe one day.
Anyway, so great to be able to do Rapid Application Development once again, the latest Delphi is a win, maybe Embarcadero finally saw the light again. Fingers crossed.
1: "I only wish Delphi had a "favorites" filter for the Object Inspector, so you could quickly access your most needed..."
I recommend you install GExperts. It's a free, sources included, nifty utility that greatly improves Delphi IDE.
2: "The other thing Delphi should really have is a way to "package and export" (or snapshot) the whole Delphi setup...." ... "....I find it still a big pain to open an old project on a new machine and having to spend three hours searching and installing components in their latest versions again"
Those are 2 different things. For 1st part, get a docker container / VirtualBox / VMware machine and you can get everything in the snapshot way. I have a VMWare machine from 2007 with Delphi 7 and tons of components from that era, that works like a charm to this day. For 2nd part, to get latest version of components for latest version of Delphi - well, there is a GetIt package manager built in Delphi directly or you can just get the components from their vendors and use their installer. All major Delphi component vendors (TMS, DevExpress, ReportBuilder, etc) have that.
Have fun, I know I do everyday in Delphi. I am a freelancer for 13 years already and 90% of my projects are in Delphi.
> I have a VMWare machine from 2007 with Delphi 7 and tons of components from that era, that works like a charm to this day.
I did the same back in 2007 or 2008 after spending 3 days with a consultant setting it up.
Then, before I got a working backup, the external drive that we had it on broke down :-/
Still remember the process:
I hunted source forge, bookshelves, file shares, cabinets and old vendor web sites to find every dependency we needed.
This was around the same time I was introduced to Maven and while it took me a while to fully grasp Maven, once I realized that one small tool could replace this process I was sold.
(To anyone who grew up with Nuget or NPM/Yarn: back you added depencies in Visual Studio the same way as you did in Delphi, by downloading them and double clicking them and clicking next, next, next, accept, next and install. And everyone still knew Javascript was a toy language and didn't need a package manager.)
I did not know that Pascal is still in use till today. What kind of freelancing projects are in demand? I mean in Delphi/Pascal. If you do not mind my asking.
Anything a business needs. The idea is to actually hunt for a business owner that has problems and they don't care about the programming language you use to solve the problems. When I quote the estimated hours of some application they need in Delphi vs React or C# or whatever other programming language they heard through the vine is good for them, they always choose Delphi. In the end they care about problem solving, not the tech behind.
> The Community Edition license applies solely if Licensee cumulative annual revenue (of the for-profit organization, the government entity or the individual developer) or any donations (of the non-profit organization) does not exceed USD $5,000.00 (or the equivalent in other currencies) (the "Threshold"). If Licensee is an individual developer, the revenue of all contract work performed by developer in one calendar year may not exceed the Threshold (whether or not the Community Edition is used for all projects). For example, a developer who receives payment of $5,000.00 for a single project (or more than $5,000.00 for multiple projects) even if such engagements do not anticipate the use of the Community Edition, is not allowed to use the Community Edition. In addition, a developer building solely an app store application would not be allowed to use the Community Edition once the app store revenue reaches a revenue of $5,000.00 or more in a year.
Embarcadero was bought out by Idera, who has a long history of buying out niche-y software development companies and offshoring development while wringing every last possible dollar out of the now-declining carcass. If you're looking for relevance or innovation, look elsewhere.
> Embarcadero was bought out by Idera, who has a long history of buying out niche-y software development companies and offshoring development while wringing every last possible dollar out of the now-declining carcass. If you’re looking for relevance or innovation, look elsewhere.
Not sure that differs from what Embarcadero’s been doing with the devtools unit it bought from Borland for the last 15 years by much, though.
No x64 Android, no macOS and no Linux support in C++Builder, unfortunately. It could have been a nice solution for cross-platform open source apps, boosting its adoption.
I don't want to be as severe as saying "they botched a release that otherwise could have been gamechanger," but it's very hard to deny x64 Android support is something I've been looking for in a long time from Embarcadero. I jumped straight into the Feature Matrix and got disappointed.
Back in my childhood and teenage years I played with Delphi until Delphi 7 Enterprise, after that the IDE got too heavy for my old computer (the XE release days). Today I have more than enough capable laptop and I don't feel like playing with Delphi anymore because I just moved on, but C++ is a language I appreciate and I'd like to take seriously for mobile development[0].
I'll start to think they whether they are seriously behind in technology to advance the C++ libraries and compiler to these platforms (which makes them, incompetent in terms of market strategy? underfunded?) or that they are deliberately hindering C++Builder, which has always been 2nd-class in front of Delphi (which shoots themselves in the foot?). It's so unfortunate they couldn't/didn't release x64 Android support on this C++Builder release.
I'm not saying Delphi should die, as I said previously: Delphi is the language that got me into programming, before it made me go away thanks to its heavy IDE back then... I loved Delphi, but I don't want to go back to it just to develop mobile apps. I guess I'll keep on my road to Flutter and reading this launch post was just a 5-minute distraction.
--
[0]: I'm well aware I can use Java or Kotlin and then jump into Android NDK, yeah... I just miss using a RAD-type IDE.
To be fair, C++ was never their primary focus. Everything from Borland was Pascal-oriented, even C++ Builder's GUI and components were Delphi-based. Quality of Builder vs. Delphi was worse, compiler performance too. Visual Studio 6 started beating Builder in every aspect except ease of GUI design.
A big part of the value proposition for Delphi was the VCL (no idea the state of such nowadays), and actual sane layout management. But pretty much everything Delphi did with the VCL is part of Cocoa anyway, so you're left with either reusing the VCL and having weird windows UI elements in Cocoa (I'm assuming buttons, etc would be cocoa controls, but <grandpa>back in my day</grandpa> the Delphi community had tonnes of VCL UI components that were all/mostly custom drawn - e.g. windows), or only really using the language itself in which case freepascal exists, so you might as well use that.
Delphi was my first language for actual software, alas (or fortunately?) that code has been lost to the mists of time. But I pretty much bailed Delphi during the Insprise BS (it came at the time I was moving to linux and "adopting" Java and C[++] so from a "keep developers around" PoV the insprise BS was well timed for me to abandon to just say F this).
My father has been developing a Delphi CRUD application for nearly 25 years now as a hobby. It’s quite fascinating—he never saw any reason to change languages or environments, as they have always done what he needed them to do.
This release is great as he’s just moved over to a HiDPI screen and Delphi 11 automatically deals with the awkward sizing issues that come with that, but he was stuck on Delphi 10.3 manually updating every component (trying to anyway, the documentation is SO poor for it)! I called him when I read this with the good news, and he sounded quite excited by the prospect of not needing to do that anymore!
He worked in the garment industry, for a company that would manufacture clothes for Inditex etc. The programme has a lot of sections. From what I recall: A records module for all the fabrics used, all the designs the designers would come up with, and all the trimmings. The styles module "compiles" the styles and garments; the orders module keeps track of the amounts of orders placed by the customer and starts the preparing to manufacture process. Then there are quite a few different report modules that deal with things in the manufacturing stages, such as truck loading (say a truck is on the way to Morocco, it has picked up the garments and is on the way back, etc.). Then it also deals with samples the customer requests (as you would get at a fabric or paint shop), and the list goes on! Essentially, it is a digital replacement for all the manual processes the company would have to go through (and as I recall, it was all quite manual!). Something bespoke but where the scope is actually quite huge for one person to do. Even though he’s retired now, he’s still working on it!
If one is looking for "free" multiplatform (both - IDE and produced executables) Delphi they're much better off using open source counterpart - Lazarus. The debugger is not as good but it is free, runs on many platforms. I successfully used it on Windows, Linux (PC and Raspberry Pi) and no stupid terms attached (like this $5000 revenue).
A windows-exclusive IDE for building GUIs for Windows and iOS. The community edition requires a phone number. If it weren't for the iOS bit, I'd say these guys are stuck in the 90s.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with the language itself, nobody in their right minds would develop anything new in it.
The dev environment and GUI builder are really nice for building desktop windows apps, 2002-style. But the world has moved on just a little from that.
You’re also never going to get modern software engineering tools for it. To consider just the flavour of the month, GitHub Copilot is never going to be much use in Delphi.
Embarcadero is in the business of milking this dead product for all the juice that's left in it. I'd in no way _start_ a business using embarcadero, it's pretty much strictly for legacy products.
I won a Sencha Mobile contest once, an eternity ago, and the website was hosted on the designers server (I met him on the sencha forums). We had a cron script to scrape twitter, and that cron job is still running and sending me emails, and I haven't been able to get a hold of him since.
It's been sending me emails every 60 seconds for a decade with no way to for me to turn it off.
Chris if you're reading this, please clear the cron job on blackspade.
Sorry that should have said the cron job is still sending me emails. No he uninstalled python at some point and it's just telling me that it's missing. I'll try to see how long it ran successfully though.
Yeah. They were way late on 64-bit support. Yeah, most of us didn't need 64-bit but it was devastating to those who did (note that integrating with a 64-bit application means you need 64-bit support.) That told us we couldn't count on them--from that point on I never started a new project in Delphi and I didn't even reinstall it the last time I rebuilt my machine.
C# copied most of the good stuff from Delphi (and, unlike C++, didn't retain the minefield that is C) and since then has gotten almost everything Delphi had. The only thing that comes to mind that C# doesn't have arrays that aren't zero-based. (Delphi supports arrays with arbitrary bounds and supports arrays based on an enum. In C# I'm always casting enums to ints to use them.) Why would I look back??
C# also does not have interface implementation delegation which would be a nice to have. Unfortunately both C# and Object Pascal do not support composition over inheritance paradigm well.
Minus the AOT compilation (NGEN was never taken seriously, and MDIL/.NET native were only for store apps) and we had to wait until C# 7 for the seeds from Midori to give back the low level programing capabilities from Delphi.
On the AOT front, .NET 8 still won't be able to cover all .NET workloads.
Back in the 00s Delphi and VB6 were really popular especially with teens on the web such as myself at the time. I wanted to try Delphi back a few years because it seems to build reasonable UIs without me having to use Qt (not really excited at C++) or Electron. The dang price is several thousands of dollars, I have zero interest in paying thousands for a hobby tool.
I remember a friend telling me that they'd learned Delphi or Pascal school in the 1990s - they didn't have anything bad to say about it but deep down they wondered what something like a game or web browser was written in as they didn't seem like they were written in Delphi or Pascal.
embarcadero would make an absolute killing if they made something like c++ builder but for rust. They have the resources to make their own cross platform gui library and make it integrated into their IDE.
THIS!! A high-quality cross-platform GUI toolkit that can be built using Delphi's RAD designer would be a huge hit in the market, IMHO. There is literally nothing that does this now.
Rust is a small blip in the radar compared to C/C++ even Pascal, and its adoption has stagnated.
The hype surrounding it just gives the impression of a wide userbase. Yeah it’s used in the industry but mostly for niche security related things. But even there, if you really need safety-critical security, use spark or certified (misra, autosar, sei cert) C/C++.
> Rust is a small blip in the radar compared to C/C++ even Pascal,
c++ sure, but Pascal? rust is being actively integrated into the linux kernel and windows libraries. Thats not even including surrealdb or any of the other crypto projects out there.
>If you're a small company or organization with up to US$5,000 per year in revenue, you can also use the Delphi CE. Once your company's total revenue reaches US$5,000, or your team expands to more than five developers, you can move up to an unrestricted commercial license with Professional edition.
For those who are Delphi curious you can use the wonderful skia4delphi [1] with firemonkey which gives you high quality graphics for all fire monkey components. So you can use all the existing components and commercial components and they'll render perfectly. Once you start using it you'll realise how awful and painful web development is. Fire monkey is the component library that works across windows (32 and 64 bit)/Mac/iOS/Android, replaces the old VCL windows only library.
It's object pascal, dating to before there were any other object pascals. These days just use free pascal if you want pascal, object or otherwise.[1]
The primary historic benefit of Delphi was the vastly superior IDE and UI layout engine (the VCL in general) to most other environments of the era, coupled with apparently very good integration with oracle DBs (where it gets its name)[2]. I'm not super convinced those arguments still apply today.
[1] Delphi has a few additional bits but mostly just support for the VCL, IDE, etc - in c compilers these would be attributes, whereas Delphi uses language level keywords.
[2] There's also compile time I guess, but .NET basically got MS to the same ballpark with C# and VB.net (the latter also making "real" apps in VB possible, though I think the general dismissal of VB < VB.net isn't super fair).
It has classes and interfaces (compatible with COM, but not reliant on COM), operator overloading, generics (mostly) and anonymous methods. Implemented a generic Y combinator in it for teh lulz years ago, for example.
It can get a bit verbose at times though, the language itself is verbose but the compiler isn't too clever with figuring out the types when it comes to generics, which reduces readability a lot.
Pretty much, with pointers and Objects. Delphi is actually surprisingly easy to learn and the environment allows to put something together very quickly.
That was my experience too. I inherited a non-trivial Delphi project in the mid-to-late '90s and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I could be productive in it.
To be fair, I did have a Pascal class in college. Never thought I'd see it again, but it paid off. Can't say the same for COBOL, once I left Andersen Consulting and its aerospace & defense clients.
It makes me so sad that Borland tools are squarely in the dustbin of history, and are now maintained almost exclusively for legacy customers. I would love to read some kind of retrospective (a book, a series of blogs, etc) on the downfall of Borland and what exact business circumstances led to its irrelevance.