The mistake is assuming Delphi is bad and stupid. Delphi is MUCH better than C and C++.
Miles ahead.
Pascal is what we need, but C is what we deserve. Billons of dollars wasted in it.
What it have bad is the massive mismanagement of the owners, and that translate to lack the influx of talent to it.
Note: I'm moderator in a Delphi forum and use it for years. I'm now in rust, and is great yet:
- Some of the problems that rust fix? Delphi too decades ago.
- Delphi still compile so fast. All the stupid c-based langs are turtles. Including LLVM. Is a sad joke that "I use C-/C++/rust" for performance and the compilers NOT PERFORM. Period.
- All the other currents langs on earth, all of them, still fail at build a GUI easily.
- Only recently, with Go and now rust, people rediscover the joy of easy deployment. Delphi have it decades ago.
Of curse Delphi is not perfect, and we the users know it. Sadly, in this industry worse is better and without a path to improve the lang you are at mercy of the owners. But like smalltalk, foxpro, hypercard and others, Delphi is a testament of what could be a decent lang/environment.
That the community at large still inflect itself with massive amounts of pain and billons of wasted effort with c/c++/js and still refuse to learn? Is something I will never understand.
P.D.2: If this sound like a rant? Yes. My super-duper machine is still compiling with rust and I'm frustrated, because this post remind me that this pain could be avoided...
The problem I had with Delphi was Embarcardero's pricing. At the time I was looking into it there was no express license or anything similar so it would've been a few hundred dollars to just try and learn. Contrast that with Visual Studio Express which was free and allowed me to learn C#. There was a significant cost to learning Delphi. Since then, however, I discovered Free Pascal and its ability to support multiple platforms and targets. Granted, I abandoned my journey of learning Object Pascal a long time ago.
I fondly remember using Delphi to create native Windows GUIs. It was really great for this.
The reason I stopped using it was that I discovered that there are many more program types than Windows GUIs - and there, C++ (or sometimes C) is really the best. High performance lock-free lists? Support for obscure network protocols? Containers with custom allocators? Delphi does not really work there.
Is interesting to note that you can see "High performance lock-free lists" in many langs, but near none have good GUIs builders. Good GUIs builders are harder, and your "High performance lock-free lists" is easy, also you can use C/C++ libraries in Delphi too...
And with Delphi the language and ecosystem are almost synonymous. Sadly. Is the compiler was free from the start and the IDE would cost money, they might have had a much stronger offering.
Miles ahead.
Pascal is what we need, but C is what we deserve. Billons of dollars wasted in it.
What it have bad is the massive mismanagement of the owners, and that translate to lack the influx of talent to it.
Note: I'm moderator in a Delphi forum and use it for years. I'm now in rust, and is great yet:
- Some of the problems that rust fix? Delphi too decades ago.
- Delphi still compile so fast. All the stupid c-based langs are turtles. Including LLVM. Is a sad joke that "I use C-/C++/rust" for performance and the compilers NOT PERFORM. Period.
- All the other currents langs on earth, all of them, still fail at build a GUI easily.
- Only recently, with Go and now rust, people rediscover the joy of easy deployment. Delphi have it decades ago.
Of curse Delphi is not perfect, and we the users know it. Sadly, in this industry worse is better and without a path to improve the lang you are at mercy of the owners. But like smalltalk, foxpro, hypercard and others, Delphi is a testament of what could be a decent lang/environment.
That the community at large still inflect itself with massive amounts of pain and billons of wasted effort with c/c++/js and still refuse to learn? Is something I will never understand.
P.D.2: If this sound like a rant? Yes. My super-duper machine is still compiling with rust and I'm frustrated, because this post remind me that this pain could be avoided...