[HN Gopher] Borland C++ Builder (2015)
___________________________________________________________________
Borland C++ Builder (2015)
Author : networked
Score : 69 points
Date : 2023-04-17 07:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (runtimeterror.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (runtimeterror.com)
| shimonabi wrote:
| I use the newest version (Alexandria) of C++ Builder everyday in
| my job since other developers in the company have legacy software
| from the 90s.
|
| You can't really open old projects in new versions of the
| software. Some devs use VMs to develop on the old versions of
| Builder.
|
| The documentation and the example code for the C++ side are
| horrible, because they are focused on Delphi. You must know
| Delphi to figure out how to use the libraries in C++. The
| documentation for Delphi also feels very light and outdated. The
| latest books about it are from the begining of the 2000s and
| there are very few Youtube videos about it.
|
| Sometimes Intellisense stops working and you don't know why.
| Sometimes some access violation happens and the debugger gives
| you no hint why.
|
| The price is also expensive. I think my company spent 2300EUR for
| a single license and they expect you to renew every year.
| prasooncc wrote:
| It's better to port cppbuilder with ui code to Mfc.that's what
| we did at last when we were absolutely done with it. As a
| fellow developer who'd been in this situation before ,my advice
| would be to start doing it now
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| I used to work at a Delphi shop that switched to C++. Of course
| we used C++ Builder.
|
| The component palette was identical to Delphi (and was still
| Object Pascal code). You could use Delphi UI components with it.
|
| C++ support was a bit buggy in places, but not terrible. I had
| worse problems compiling C++ on AIX.
|
| Delphi and C++ Builder were simply the best native UI creation
| tools I've ever used.
| fatneckbeard wrote:
| this whole borland/delphi approach is rather similar to how
| Visual Basic for Applications still works inside of Excel or
| Outlook, and is still used by big companies all over the world
| as i type this.
| haolez wrote:
| I remember trying to compile OpenCV 2 for it and the compiler
| would segfault on me.
| glonq wrote:
| For DOS development, I loved Borland Turbo C++. But for windows
| development, Borland's OWL never really clicked with me. I
| eventually got into windows using MS Visual C++ and MFC.
| zwieback wrote:
| I thought the original OWL with the proprietary syntax for
| event handlers was great but by the time the second version
| came around we'd grudgingly switched to MSC++/MFC.
| glonq wrote:
| Yeah I think the jump from DOS to Windows, procedural to
| event-driven, lite framework to rich framework, and
| barely-C++ to very-C++ was just too much for me to tackle at
| the same time.
|
| Truthfully I first dipped my toes into Windows development
| using Visual Basic, then jumped to MSVC++ & MFC after I
| quickly outgrew VB. Having smart colleagues [hi Keith!] and
| great MFC books [hi Mike Blaszczak!] around certainly made it
| easier.
| bitwize wrote:
| Embarcadero is pretty much in the business of soaking customers
| locked into Borland's old products for as much as they're willing
| to pay, hence why the IDEs cost an arm and a leg while
| competitive products are relatively cheap or free.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Meanwhile, the only real C++ RAD alternative to C++ Builder in
| 25 years was C++/CX, killed by internal WinDev politics.
|
| And maybe by .NET 9, all the kinds of Delphi workloads will be
| finally supported by Native AOT and low level coding
| capabilities.
|
| All enterprise products cost an arm and a leg, and at that
| level it hardly matters, license costs aren't where usually
| project budgets get burned.
| torbica wrote:
| >And maybe by .NET 9
|
| If I take look on roadmaps and apply developer velocity of
| MAUI, WinForms and WPF it will take many more versions.
| bitwize wrote:
| Avalonia is out there and works nicely. Looks like they're
| making a WPF compatibility layer.
| torbica wrote:
| Third party controls are simply not there yet.
| (Performant datagrids, comboboxes with complex layout
| etc)
| pascal_wizzard wrote:
| Don't use delphi, the rad sucks for everything but dragging and
| dropping components. The drag and drop is also a pain in the ass
| because it will constantly adjust the layout, making every commit
| be filled with noise. Maybe all frontend is this bad though, I
| don't have much experience with other tools.
| canistel wrote:
| But wouldn't careful usage of margins, anchoring and aligning -
| if it is possible - take care of this?
| pascal_wizzard wrote:
| In the dfm(the UI declaration file) the positions of elements
| are always absolute with relation to the forms top left
| point, they are just recalculated on the fly when a change in
| the form causes them to resize. Using alignment is great but
| it doesn't solve the problem. Not really that big of an issue
| in the big picture, just makes diffing forms annoying.
| danjoredd wrote:
| Looks like C++ Builder is still available. Its way expensive and
| the licensing for community edition is very prohibitive...if you
| make more than 5k or you have more than 5 people on your team you
| need to pay up. And you practically need to sell a kidney to
| afford it. That sucks because this IDE looks really neat, but its
| def not worth the money in my opinion unless you are a larger
| company already
|
| Community edition:
| https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder/starter
|
| Professional https://www.embarcadero.com/products/cbuilder
| jart wrote:
| Is $500/year really the going rate for a kidney? That's like
| the price to rent some GPUs for an overnight training job. I
| think it's perfectly reasonable that Embarcadero makes their
| software free to use until it's helped you earn at least 10x
| that much revenue, on top of it being a flat rate. Most
| companies just divide their offerings into strictly commercial
| / non-commercial.
| neverartful wrote:
| There are 4 different editions. $500/year is the cheapest of
| those 4 editions.
|
| https://www.embarcadero.com/app-development-tools-
| store/cbui...
| [deleted]
| danjoredd wrote:
| If you make 5k 500 is 1/10 of your yearly income. That is a
| pretty big amount, especially when you take out taxes and
| operating expenses. Thats why I said it isn't worth it UNTIL
| you are a bigger business.
| looping__lui wrote:
| Well, as a beekeeper if you wanna sell some honey you need
| to buy some bees first, no? You'd probably spend more money
| getting tools and equipment for a one-person neighborhood
| lawn mowing business...
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Good tools come with a price, and that applies to all
| industries, not just programming. The most comparable offering
| would be Microsoft Visual Studio: free up to 5 users for
| smaller companies. If you have more than 5 users, it's
| $45/user/month (for the cheaper Professional edition, but it
| would be good enough for most). And if you've got >250 PCs or
| >$1M in annual revenue, the 5 free users do not apply.
|
| https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing/?tab=business
|
| https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...
| zerr wrote:
| They have abandoned community editions - it is several years
| behind the pro edition, broken on high-DPI monitors, no code-
| completion/navigation. No plans to release a new version.
| danjoredd wrote:
| Doesn't sound like a winning strategy long-term. From other
| comments it sounds like they are focusing entirely on
| customers that are already locked in with them. Eventually
| though, those customers are either going to go out of
| business as all businesses eventually do, or they are going
| to have to move on to other tools eventually.
|
| If community edition is never updated, IDK how they can
| expect to grow or gain new customers. Thats why Visual Studio
| updates their community edition so often, because that helps
| people get familiar with the tools and companies are more
| likely to adopt them.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| I have a vague memory of a Borland C++ coming bundled with a
| rather funky Smalltalk-inspired container library - this was pre-
| STL and in fact pre-templates even. Perhaps another old fart can
| confirm or correct?
| zwieback wrote:
| I think early Borland container libraries had a "Object" base
| class for everything, pre templates. All that went away as C++
| compilers started supporting templates more. I remember this
| era as always making tradeoffs between code size, memory
| consumption, standardness and performance. Not sorry those days
| are over...
| jen20 wrote:
| These days we get huge binaries, unbounded memory
| consumption, no standards and awful performance. Much better!
| xony wrote:
| [dead]
| jll29 wrote:
| There are many posters that complain about Borland Builder's
| price tag, but what they may not realize is what Microsoft
| charged back then for Visual Studio C/C++ (plus the MSDN
| subscription fees) was likewise a lot.
|
| You got piles of books and piles of floppy disks (later piles of
| CDROMs) for that.
|
| Only recently, free development tools have become available that
| rival commercial offerings.
|
| But most serious developers do not care about a few thousand
| dollars in tooling cost, because the main determinant of software
| cost is developer salaries and nothing else. Since they are
| typically six digit dollar amounts, the cost for tools like
| editors, IDEs, compilers and libraries pales in comparison or
| becomes a rounding error.
| godot wrote:
| For companies I think you're right; but a price tag of a few
| thousand dollars was a strong deterrent for students or
| hobbyists/learners to get into doing those development. I think
| the web was great for learners in the 90s/00s because no
| special tools were necessary. All you needed was Notepad and a
| browser. If you did some CGI/Perl or PHP you may also need a
| $5-$20/mo web host account, that's about it.
| zakki wrote:
| And todays students will shape the future. If something not
| relevant with student's now, it will not relevant with
| student's future. Finally that thing will be forgotten.
| galkk wrote:
| I think Borland is great example of what happens when you don't
| care about backward compatibility and try to milk your customers
| all the time.
|
| Even since Turbo Pascal, and with Delphi, every new version
| (5->6->7) of a compiler/tool required new compiled
| libraries/components. Eventually a lot of shops (and Delphi and
| C++ builder were huge in xUSSR, for example) stopped to care and
| moved on to Java/C#.
| Topolomancer wrote:
| My first IDE when I started to be excited about programming! I
| vividly remember a book that was about teaching C++ to kids; I
| devoured it and spent a glorious summer just fiddling with what I
| thought was very complex code at the time. How time flies...
| professoretc wrote:
| Yep, I'm pretty sure Borland C++ was what I used in college in
| my first "real" programming class. The nice thing about the
| older IDEs was how easy it was to get started programming:
| start it up and you're looking at a blank source file; often
| you can compile and run without even officially saving it! Made
| it really easy to try things out. The only "IDE" that comes
| close to that level of immediacy today would be something like
| Processing.
| akhayam wrote:
| [dead]
| marcodiego wrote:
| I have to repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28491963
| again:
|
| 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 heard it improved lately) you
| could only use it with/for win32 so it lost servers, embedded,
| cloud 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.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| what I want is terminal based turbo-C++ ide with the plugin
| architecture of vscode and solid integration of code browsing.
| & yes I can do it with vim or emacs but I dont wanna.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Now people have more modern versions of the UI, it should be
| possible.
| kogus wrote:
| I worked with Delphi for several years, and it was the first
| IDE I used professionally. It was truly brilliant for
| developing Win32 and WinForms applications. I can honestly say
| that Delphi 5 was a better tool for building Windows apps than
| the latest versions Visual Studio, at least in terms of
| usability, responsiveness, and debugging.
|
| But man are you ever right about the compatibility issues!
| Upgrading from Delphi 5 to the (then current) Delphi 2005 was a
| total nightmare. Our codebase was about 600k lines, and I will
| never forget the trauma of trying to get it to just build in
| the newer version.
|
| The comparison with .NET codebases that "just work" from
| version to version is night and day, and sadly it's worth
| putting up with a laggy beast of an IDE to have that security
| around your projects.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-04-18 23:01 UTC)