The fate of Borland’s developer tools group will finally be sealed in the next couple of months, as the software vendor works to finalize deal with a buyer. Nick Jackson, managing director of Borland DTG in the Asia-Pacific region, told ZDNet that the company, which announced its intention to divest its developer product lines on Feb. 8, has attracted about 16 qualified bidders so far.
Great news, Im hope Delphi take the right path again with the new owners.
Any speculation of who may be the buyer?
Great speculation damn near nobody cares..
unless you happen to work for a company that has a large product written in delphi…
like me.
In 1995 Delphi was the coolest thing in the sw world. But it’s a proprietary language owned by a corporation that didn’t really invest in the resources to keep it up to date with new language technology. Who in their right mind would program anything in a proprietary language now?
Also, the genius behind Delphi, Anders Hejlsberg, long ago moved to MS where he developed J++ and C#. Anybody with a serious product written in Delphi ported it to Java or C# a long time ago.
Delphi is still use by a lot of programmers these days, there a lot who simple didn’t need or wanted to use C#.
Who in their right mind would program anything in a proprietary language now?
I do and many others.
Delphi is Object Pascal there are free versions like FreePascal and Lazarus.
Also, the genius behind Delphi, Anders Hejlsberg, long ago moved to MS where he developed J++ and C#.
That’s why C# is similar to Delphi but not everyone wants to be dependant of managed code or a Framework.
Edited 2006-07-01 14:52
That’s why C# is similar to Delphi but not everyone wants to be dependant of managed code or a Framework.
I’m not the biggest .Net supporter either, but…
you can specify unmanaged code in your assembly or make bindings in non-managed language if you want. How else do you think gtk-sharp interfaces with gtk for example? Gtk-sharp is not a rewrite, just bindings.
btw. with mono you don’t need to depend on .Net installed on your system. You can simply make a complete copy in your folder and distribute that one. This way your app will run in safely contained environment.
Depend on framework, you mean like you depend on VCL in Delphi?
And your other comment?
Delphi is Object Pascal there are free versions like FreePascal and Lazarus.
Lazarus is IDE for FPC, not Object Pascal. But yes, both laz and fpc are free.
btw. with mono you don’t need to depend on .Net installed on your systeim.
I’ve used mono and is cool, but you can’t compare VCL to mono support to WinForms, VCL is simple miles ahead.
Depend on framework, you mean like you depend on VCL in Delphi?
That is linked to the executable in a small size, the same can be done in .NET but is in beta.
Delphi depends of VCL only if you use it, you can call Windows API directly but VCL is the reason I use Delphi in the firsth place.
Edited 2006-07-01 18:24
btw,Most of Delphi libraries are open sourced.
I agree with your sentiment towards Delphi, but I think there are better languages to port things into than C# or Java.
Edited 2006-07-03 03:23
I have trouble seeing where Delphi is going to go. It seems to be basically viable for continued win32 development, but win32 is definitely yesterday’s technology and isn’t really suitable for new projects.
I don’t think that delphi.net offers much hope either;
it’s torn between being semantically compatible with the CLR and not becoming too distant from delphi.win32.
It doesn’t really work either; when I evaluated delphi.net I found that the _compiler_ would consistently crash about 4 times a day, which is terrifying. And the VCL.NET is stillborn. Seen many 3rd party components for VCL.NET lately? Me neither.
My real hope is that “DevCo” really pays attention to making it (a) less completely bug ridden [1] and (b) as fast as Visual Studio. No new features please, just make the existing ones actually work.
[1] personal favourite is the “catastropic error” msgbox it sometimes shows when closing — who in their right mind let that text through quality control?
I agree with all you just said, that’s why my hopes are with the new buyers, sadly, Borland let Delphi die, but as long I have to program for the win32 technology Delphi will be the way to go for me.
I admit, I haven’t used Delphi since version 3 or maybe 4, but to hear that it is slow enough to cause people to wish it was as “fast” as VisualStudio is really saying something. It must be a crawler.
The thing that killed Delphi more than anything is Borland’s pricing. When you can get great IDEs for free, the everyday Joe isn’t going to go out and spend over $3,000.00 for a development tool.
That being the case, Borland’s mindshare is very limited and they can only end up failing, I think.
Nah, I don’t think that pricing is an issue. Nobody even batted and eyelid at the price [1] when we upgraded our team to D2006; our concerns were with 3rd party component compatibility and what ported work would be required.
Delphi isn’t going to gain any new mindshare, however I can’t imagine universities switching from Java even if Delphi were free.
It’s the past.
[1] $3k is for the “architect” version, the regular “processional” version is only £1k.