[HN Gopher] Delphi 11 and C++Builder 11 Community Editions Released
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Delphi 11 and C++Builder 11 Community Editions Released
Author : mariuz
Score : 97 points
Date : 2023-04-27 13:01 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.embarcadero.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.embarcadero.com)
| shimonabi wrote:
| They should pay someone to create a good modern tutorial/book how
| to develop real commercial applications, not just include code of
| trivial examples.
|
| I'm using C++ Builder in my day job and the documentation is
| sparse, with very few examples and most recent books are from the
| early 2000's.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Alternatively try to look at C++/WinRT with WinUI, and you will
| get an appreciation for C++ Builder.
|
| Microsoft still hasn't managed to offer anything similar for
| C++ (other than the shortly lived C++/CX) in 25 years.
|
| Although I do agree the documentation is awful, specially when
| compared with the old Borland printed manuals.
| hosteur wrote:
| Why would I use this over Lazarus or CodeTyphon? Both are free
| and open source.
| kernal wrote:
| >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.
|
| OFFS.
| nenadst wrote:
| from their website ".... can now enjoy the milestone innovations
| of the 11 Alexandria Pro edition.."
|
| which means that you cannot use "Client-Server" databases (Mysql,
| Postgres, etc.), only localhost access is supported.
|
| you can use ZeosLib etc. but its just one more hurdle to take.
| blibble wrote:
| > You or your company must have revenues less than US$5,000.
|
| seems a bit low
| qorrect wrote:
| 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.
| langfan wrote:
| Idera
| qorrect wrote:
| Oh wow they have a bunch of stuff.
|
| 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.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| That's amazing! Is it still actually managing to scrape
| some data after all these years? Or do you just get
| emails with nothing in them?
| qorrect wrote:
| 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.
| MrAlex94 wrote:
| 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!
| pascal_wizzard wrote:
| is v11 still 32 bit?
| shipit2030 wrote:
| it should support 64 bit
| unnouinceput wrote:
| it does
| unnouinceput wrote:
| Yes. It has full 64 bit support though (both linker and
| debugger) + rest of major OS'es as compiling target.
| mtkd wrote:
| A no-cruft Ruby backed version of Delphi with full cross-platform
| support would clean up right now
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| 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.
| bloblaw wrote:
| 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.
| minsight wrote:
| 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.
| kej wrote:
| To be fair it's not like Delphi saw a bunch of innovation under
| Embarcadero, either.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| xony wrote:
| [dead]
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| > 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.
|
| How generous.
| FpUser wrote:
| 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).
| imagine99 wrote:
| 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.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| 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.
| faisal_ksa wrote:
| 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.
| zabzonk wrote:
| well, this is good to see, although imho Embarcadero have been
| pretty disasterous owners of the delphi brand and technologies.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 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??
| pjmlp wrote:
| 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.
| t00 wrote:
| 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.
| yazzku wrote:
| 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.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Ever heard of Visual Studio, XCode, Microchip,...?
| nottorp wrote:
| Last time something about the ghosts of Delphi/C++ Builder was
| posted here a few people mentioned very aggressive marketing
| and licensing.
|
| So I guess the phone number is there so they can threaten you
| into buying a license.
| dmitrybrant wrote:
| 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.
| tabtab wrote:
| 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.)
| dt3ft wrote:
| 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?
| dt3ft wrote:
| 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.
| lelanthran wrote:
| There was a critical time in the industry, if your tech didn't
| run on Linux it was dead in the water.
|
| Delphi and C++ builder should have been ported to Linux and the
| BSDs by 2001.
|
| They hitched their wagon to Windows and are now almost a
| footnote in history.
|
| Come to think of it, almost all Windows only applications faced
| the same fate.
| comrad wrote:
| Well, they did in 2003. Kylix was the attempt to offer Delphi
| 6 RAD for Linux.
|
| https://wiki.freepascal.org/Kylix
| lelanthran wrote:
| I don't remember why, but kylix didn't work for me.
|
| And C++ builder was never ported.
| Zuider wrote:
| 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.
| dvh wrote:
| If you want to use SQL then $4400 per seat and subsequent years
| $1000 per seat.
| omnibrain wrote:
| If you want to use the built in stuff (FireDAC?).
|
| Depending on the DBMS you use there are open source components
| or you could license UniDAC starting from $300.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| "the robust and easy-to-learn Delphi language"
|
| Which is Pascal, isn't it?
| notimetorelax wrote:
| Pretty much, with pointers and Objects. Delphi is actually
| surprisingly easy to learn and the environment allows to put
| something together very quickly.
| ShadowBanThis01 wrote:
| 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.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| It's Pascal, but extended a fair bit.
|
| 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.
| olliej wrote:
| 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).
| jonsen wrote:
| > It's object pascal, dating to before there were any other
| object pascals.
|
| "The language was originally developed by Apple Computer":
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Pascal
| olliej wrote:
| True, I should have been clearer "commercial for PCs" :D
|
| Turbo Pascal had some "object" extensions in the last
| versions, but Delphi was Borland's fully formed object
| oriented successor to TP.
| zerr wrote:
| 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.
| wdb wrote:
| Pretty sure Linux was supported in the past? You had CLX as
| alternative for VCL. I think there were betas for it. Kylix was
| pretty fun.
| marcodiego wrote:
| > It could have been a nice solution for cross-platform open
| source apps, boosting its adoption.
|
| I don't think anything "as proprietary as delphi" could be a
| "nice solution for cross-platform open source apps".
| pknerd wrote:
| Broke my heart. I want to use both Delphi and C builder on my
| Mac
| olliej wrote:
| 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).
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I literally came here to write this comment.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2023-04-27 23:01 UTC)