Avoid Delphi and use Free Pascal + Lazarus IDE, unless…

[Zath]

P.s. did you guys also get a special offer this week from Idera? I could /upgrade/ (from XE7) to the latest and greatest delphi pro for the diminutive sum of Eur 1200, which already included a 30% discount.

As I said above, yes, I was offered terms.
I checked Embarcadero's site afterwards and they had some promo on too. Slight variations but similar value.
Sadly upgrading from D5 Enterprise didn't get me anywhere
I've been in contact with Embarcadero due to past purchases but never had contact with Idera until they phoned me at work, out of the blue.

[Mr.Madguy]

What are you smoking?

Code: Pascal  [Select][+][-]

1. program program1;
2. {$ifdef fpc}{$mode delphi}{$H+}{$endif}
3. type
4. TPair<X, Y> = record
5.   end;
6.   TObject1<T> = class
7.   end;
8.   TObject2<X, Y> = class(TObject1<TPair<X, Y>>)
9.   end;
10. begin end.

Simply compiles....

I know about Delphi mode, but he said, that FPC generics are somehow better, than Delphi ones.

He's smoking FPC 3.0.0 or FPC 3.0.2 or FPC 3.0.4 .

Yeah, still "Syntax error", even in Delphi mode. FPC 3.0.2.

[marcov]

I know about Delphi mode, but he said, that FPC generics are somehow better, than Delphi ones.

No, just better than the OLDER Embarcadero sold Delphi's D2009,D2010,DXE.  DXE3(*) is better, but some things that work fine in FPC3 didn't work up to Delphi XE7. (e.g. pointermath with types that are e.g. 3 bytes). qc88326,88327,88369,99324,99703,111795,118104 were all discovered this way.

In versions DXE and even worse D2009 (which I personally own, the newer versions are from work), the support is sad, very sad, IEs all the time. But after D2009 upgrading became more and more expensive.

(*) I skipped from DXE to DXE3, so can't say much about DXE2,

[bee]

Wow… guys, c'mon… if you're gonna talk about the technical details of FPC vs Delphi, please get a room for yourself. This thread is about why we should avoid Delphi and go for FPC and LazIDE in general and non-technical term, especially for educations, newbies, hobbyists, and indie/startup developers.

Take it easy.

[marcov]

Wow… guys, c'mon… if you're gonna talk about the technical details of FPC vs Delphi, please get a room for yourself. This thread is about why we should avoid Delphi and go for FPC and LazIDE in general and non-technical term, especially for educations, newbies, hobbyists, and indie/startup developers.

Well, that argument would be a lot more compelling if the debug experience on Windows was even in the same magnitude as delphi. It isn't unfortunately.

[sam707]

keep it simple

if yar living in a country where you make $300 per yer/month, you wont afford delphi's crap'n'shit price curve.

[sam707]

and this is not only in africa! i knew a nice gurl from a romanian university, with a skill at computer sciences LOOOOL

[sam707]

finally =>

all these people (i would say hundreds of thousands at least) around the World, from hobbyists to skilled, do not care if Lazarus has much more powerfull TGrid components or better generics than the unaffordable Delphi, they even do not care about 'compatibility'. All what they need is to live their hobby, do their researches, make at home or at work what they need!

If Lazarus is stuck at Expensive crap compatibility, it's ok, if it is not stuck and invent new extensions, it is also ok, to these people, earning $300 per month or year

[molly]

and this is not only in africa! i knew a nice gurl from a romanian university, with a skill at computer sciences LOOOOL

Are you gender-bashing there ? If it is then i would say: typical. I will pray for you if you ever meet real girl-power (i've chosen "if" for a particular reason, because males often have the illusion it is their choice) 

[molly]

you should try to not be OFF topic as you often are on this forum...

This message is just here to remind you of your own off-topic words, to which i replied. You are for sure a real gentlemen with your choice of words *barf*.

Speaking of donkey's: i would love to inform you on how you never ever have to read any of my messages again in a full automated way ,... but alas, that would be off-topic

@molly shud up barker, i married that gurl, find a sheep and a life, poor idiot of nonsense

you should try to not be OFF topic as you often are on this forum, poor minded donkey u HAHAHHAHAH

dear fuckedup @molly

until you came and troll, I was not OFF topic, and only refering to the post subject, that is, the aggressive politic policy price of Delphi against the Lazarus free model.
Worldwide unaffordable Delphi

there you came! with yer gender reverse engineering HAHAHAHAHAH

huh... even if at least, civilization ran a way 15000 years long,  telling and yelling <all Great Ancestors were so damn wrong about gendernisalazation! HERE COMES the "L"ight with molly> on a ...... what the heck??? a programmers forum? SUCH A RIGHT PLACE HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHA MORON U

Catch a Doctor or a dedicated forum for your sexual issues HAHAHAHAH, defunnytalately NOT ME  

[Remy Lebeau]

Delphi's pricing and business model are obviously NOT for students and teachers, hobbyist, nor indie developers.

The only reason I've been able to stick with Delphi/C++Builder/RADStudio as long as I have is because:

1. the company I work for started out 20-odd years ago as a Borland house.  All of our software was written exclusively in C++Builder at the time.  And while most of our older software we still sell is still being written in C++Builder (the TPTB's never let us upgrade the IDE after all these years!), newer projects in the past several years have been done in C# instead.  And my company was recently bought by another company that is using C# almost exclusively (1 old project in Delphi).  So, our C++Builder projects are likely going to die in the next few years as C# projects replace them.

2. being a member of TeamB, I get RADStudio Enterprise versions directly from Embarcadero for free, so I have had every version release over the past 15 years or so.  That alone has really been my driving force.  Without that, I probably wouldn't have gotten into Pascal at all, let alone stuck with C++Builder as long as I have (outside of my job, that is).

I certainly could never afford Delphi/C++Builder/RADStudio on my own!

[iAnonGuy]

This is no longer a viable business model for a developer tools vendor.  The bottom price for Developer Tools is $0.  They are not targeting their tools at that market.  That market no longer exists, unless you're selling some cheap editor that people can get religious about.

The fact that Free Pascal and Lazarus exists (and has for quite some time) is absolute testament to this.  I don't believe that these products wouldn't exist if prices were lower, considering FPC pre-dates the big price jump that happened with Borland pivoted their focus to the Enterprise.  The OP indirectly works off of the assumption that if commercial developer tools were cheaper, we wouldn't have need for free developer tools.  That's a false assumption, since people almost always prefer free to cheap (even when cheap has a much higher quality) and there are always people who claim (or objectively can't) they cannot afford cheap.

This is why "Freemium" is such an effective business model in mobile.  The illusion that something is free is the easiest way to rope in users.

After all, that's the whole point of the F/OSS movement, is it not?  The point isn't that commercial software costs too much, it's that it costs anything at all...

Lazarus is less polished than the copy of C++Builder 4 Professional that I have,  and so is practically every F/OSS Linux IDE out there (except those that were gifted to the community by corporations - like Eclipse and NetBeans, and I think Java is a fairly awful system requirement for a C/C++ or Object Pascal IDE).  None of those users care, because they are not going to pay $400 for an IDE (much less a compiler - have you seen the prices for Intel's compilers, btw?  No one's complaining...).

The reason why Delphi gets flack for its pricing is due to history.  Borland grew its business in the Educational (Student), Indie, and SMB markets.  The people crying about the prices are largely out of that market.  Guess what?  They literally don't care, because you aren't their target market anymore.  You haven't been their target market for the past 15-16 or so years... They priced their tools aggressively low to compete against entrenched players and grow their user base, but that is not sustainable when F/OSS drops the baseline cost to $0 and deletes the need for people to look to your cheaper products as a workable alternative to more expensive products.  When this happened, even Borland's cheaper prices became "too expensive" to many of the people in the market they were targetting.

They had to pivot to Enterprise, and in that sense...  Their prices are pretty much in line with what others are charging.

The only people who are put off by this are those who still want them to sell 2017's developer tools as if they were still operating in 1995's developer tools market.

Sorry.  No bueno.

FPC and Lazarus have their place.  I find FPC to be quite good.  I think Lazarus is severely lacking in polish.  If I were a professional developer, I would scrape together the money to get Delphi as soon as I could, and just use FPC/Lazarus to port - though I'd likely just ignore anything but Windows/MacOS since the others are irrelevant when it comes to developing end-user software for the consumer market.

[mas steindorff]

If I were a professional developer, I would scrape together the money to get Delphi as soon as I could, and just use FPC/Lazarus to port - though I'd likely just ignore anything but Windows/MacOS since the others are irrelevant when it comes to developing end-user software for the consumer market.

oddly, I'm starting to earn $$ creating software for Unix based OS thanks to an upsurge of single board computers.   

[dbannon]

I think Lazarus is severely lacking in polish.

Well, I went from Turbo Pascal to Delphi 1 and 2 then moved away. My return, via Lazarus is pretty good experience indeed ! I have not seen a recent Delphi so cannot comment. But Lazarus does the job for me now and would have been fine way back then.

As for Embarcadero policies, its a pretty normal business model for people who buy and sell going businesses. If you buy a business thats doing well, you coast from there spending the absolute minimum to keep people on track. And you run it down making a good profit while you do so.
Then, someone else buys it, they put a lot of work in attracting new customers, build it up and hopefully sell it to someone else. And the cycle continues.
Embarcadero has no incentive to attract new users offering deals for hobby and small scale users, they don't pay short term.

Davo

[iAnonGuy]

If I were a professional developer, I would scrape together the money to get Delphi as soon as I could, and just use FPC/Lazarus to port - though I'd likely just ignore anything but Windows/MacOS since the others are irrelevant when it comes to developing end-user software for the consumer market.

oddly, I'm starting to earn $$ creating software for Unix based OS thanks to an upsurge of single board computers.   

Developing end user software for the consumer market? That was the primary scenario for which delphi was used when it was cheap.

Borland developer tools were a great alternative to the IDEs/Compilers which cost multiple hundreds of dollars from Watcom, Microsoft, and others. Back the commercial software market was still a thing. Shareware was big. A lot of those developers used Borland tools.

Or did you not read the text that you quoted, fully?