Embarcadero Delphi is sold!

[rvk]

Oh and RVK you do under stand a person can wish for a thing to happen but not expect it.  Nowhere did I say the new owner's have to listen to me, I think maybe you drank a little too much coffee.

BobS, I think you may have directed this at the wrong person. I did understand what you meant and I tried to explain this to HeavyUser, who was the one I think this reply was meant for:

after all isn't that what "free market" means?

In what planet? If you are not trolling then you are grossly under educated. Try reading a book on communism or capitalism to find out what free market refers to. Any way today moto is leave free or die old its up to you.

I said:

So... Embarcadero is also completely free in determining its price for its products. I don't see BobS arguing that. He knows we live with a "free market"-economy.

[BobS]

Ooops, sorry RVK I managed to look at the wrong line.  Anyway next time I make a pun like that I'll be sure to emphasis it with underlines and an extra smile or two .

[jack616]

To jack616 :I believe, in fact, quite the opposite: I'm actually amazed on how far languages and development IDEs have gone,

I'm open to persuasion - so ?

[BeniBela]

To jack616 : If you are stuck at D3 and keep that point of view, then I'm sorry, but it sounds like you are just being ignorant on purpose. I believe, in fact, quite the opposite: I'm actually amazed on how far languages and development IDEs have gone, and sometimes miss good old DOS days, where you had full control of everything and many things were so simple...

I agree with jack.

It is amazing how far some languages have come, yet FPC/Lazarus are still on the level of ten-year old Delphi versions

[Graeme]

and sometimes miss good old DOS days, where you had full control of everything and many things were so simple...

Just curious about that statement. Mind elaborating a bit? What do you not have full control over to say that? What isn't "simple" any more?

As I said, I'm just curious, because I have full control over everything on my workstation today... I run FreeBSD so my whole OS is open source. I develop with Free Pascal - thus open source compiler. I use Lazarus or MSEide as my IDE - both open source. I develop my application with fpGUI Toolkit - open source and 100% custom drawn toolkit, so again I have full control over everything. As a programmer, life can't be better. ;-)

Embarcadero's typical clients are large enterprises with big budget, where the price of product may actually be considered too cheap.

Sure, that is what EMBT would want everybody to believe. I see many on Google+ and ever EMBT's own newsgroup complain about the high prices - forcing them to buy Maintenance Plans because individual upgrades would be too expensive too.

Remember the days of Turbo Pascal (if you are old enough)? It was MUCH cheaper back then, and that drove its popularity in the 90's. Everybody could afford a copy of Turbo Pascal. Just about every application (BBS, Mail Readers, Mail processors, office type applications etc) was all written with Turbo Pascal too. That popularity translated to when Delphi got released too. That's until about Delphi 7 & Kylix 3 when Borland gave up on development tools.

[Graeme]

It is amazing how far some languages have come, yet FPC/Lazarus are still on the level of ten-year old Delphi versions

Oh my word... Have you even used Delphi from 10 years ago? Free Pascal is miles ahead regarding language features, and supported platforms and target CPU's if you have to compare that to Delphi from 10 years ago. Hell, you can even compare it to the current Delphi, and I would still say the same thing. Lazarus IDE is every bit on par with the latest Delphi IDE too - some areas I would say even head of the game.

Often the misconception is because the two IDE's are different. Lazarus IDE was never meant to be a Delphi IDE clone. So there is a learning curve switching between the two - things are slightly different arranged etc. But functionality wise I find Lazarus IDE a lot better and faster than Delphi IDE, and I use both for work purposes.

ps:
You might have forgotten... Embarcadero was so impressed with FPC and it's quality that they actually shipped FPC with Delphi, so they could have OSX and iOS support. If FPC wasn't of very high quality, Embarcadero would NEVER have done that! That in itself tells me that FPC definitely isn't lacking in the quality and features department.

[BeniBela]

Oh my word... Have you even used Delphi from 10 years ago? Free Pascal is miles ahead regarding language features, and supported platforms and target CPU's if you have to compare that to Delphi from 10 years ago.

Ofc. I still keep some of my sources compatible with Delphi 4.

Only noticable language  difference  is that D4 does not have exit(something)

Although the platforms  are really missing

edit: wait. Delphi 4 was 15 years ago. Not 10 years ago.  I am getting too old

Hell, you can even compare it to the current Delphi, and I would still say the same thing.

That is because Delphi is getting worse every year

[ykot]

Damn, I'm getting too old for this... :/

[jack616]

Is that supposed to be serious?

[ykot]

Is that supposed to be serious?

Sorry, I've corrected the post. I think you should keep using D3.

[Graeme]

Only noticable language  difference  is that D4 does not have exit(something)

Clearly you don't keep track of what FPC has to offer over and above Delphi 4-7. Here is a short (incomplete) list of language features or additions:

• For-in loop support
• Sealed and Abstract classes
• Better support for Delphi-compatible classes - this includes newer Delphi versions too.
• Advanced record syntax
• Enumerators in records
• Support for class and record helpers
• Generic records, arrays and procedural types
• Scoped enumerations
• Custom deprecated messages
• Support for the Objective-Pascal dialect
• Constref parameter modifier
• Basic ISO Standard Pascal support
• Support for nested procedure variables
• Support for non-local goto's
• Support for &-escaping of keywords
• Support for univ parameters in MacPas mode
• CExtended floating point type
• SAR intrinsics
• ROL/ROR intrinsics
• Bitscan intrinsics
• Boolean16, Boolean32 and Boolean64 types
• Anonymous inherited calls
• Overload modifier must be present in the interface
• AnsiStrings are now codepage-aware
• Variant overload preference for string types
• Variant conversion preference for widechar
• Default values in implementation but not in interface/forward declaration
• Default values are now properly typechecked
• "strict protected" visibility modifier
• Support for type helpers added
• "strict protected" and "protected" visibility modifier in extended records
• "static" directive on non-class methods
• "static" directive on class operators
• Classes implementing forward-declared interfaces
• Using the function name as alias for loading its current result value in MacPas mode
• nostackframe forbidden for Pascal subroutines
• Conversion preference of pansichar to various string types
• Comparative operators can have any result type
• True and False are not keywords anymore
• For-in loop variable cannot be assigned to anymore
• Casting integer variables to floating point

Then there is the fact that FPC is a 16bit, 32bit and 64bit compiler. Has many various language and CPU optimisations, supports Java Bytecode output too, supports a massive amount of target CPU's and OS Platforms.

Free Pascal 2.6 and 3.0 is currently available for the following platforms:
- Linux-i386
- Linux-x86_64 (amd64)
- Linux-powerpc
- Linux-sparc
- Linux-ARM
- Win32-i386 (2000/XP, WinNT or later)
- Win64-x86_64 (XP or later)
- Wince-ARM (cross compiled from win32-i386)
- FreeBSD-i386
- FreeBSD-x86_64
- Mac OS X/Darwin for PowerPC (32 and 64 bit)
- Mac OS X/Darwin for Intel (32 and 64 bit)
- iOS (ARM and AArch64/ARM64) and iPhoneSimulator (32 and 64 bit)
- OS/2-i386 (OS/2 Warp v3.0, 4.0, WarpServer for e-Business and eComStation)
- Haiku-i386
- GO32v2-i386
- Nintendo Gameboy Advance-ARM (cross compile from win32-i386)
- Nintendo DS-ARM (cross compile from win32-i386)
- Nintendo Wii-powerpc (cross compile from win32-i386)
- AIX 5.3 and later for PowerPC (32 and 64 bit)
- Java JVM (1.5 and later) and Android Dalvik (Android 4.0 and later)
- Android (ARM, i386, MIPS) via cross-compiling.

These are just the official ones! There are still many unofficial ones too, like other *BSD targets, IBM Mainframes etc.

References:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPC_New_Features_2.4.2
http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_2.6.2
http://wiki.freepascal.org/User_Changes_3.0

Yeah, so the language feature list is a bit more than simply an enhanced exit(...) function. ;-)  Needless to say FPC is well beyond what D7 could do or offered.

[ykot]

Graeme, telling about great new features won't work for people stuck at D3/D4 era; specifically, getting past 1st stage of unconscious incompetence might be quite difficult. Arguing about it won't work either, because for person to agree with you, that the new compiler/IDE is way ahead of old D3/D4, the person needs to accept his/her own deficit of knowledge in the field first.

This gets especially bad when people state "something is no good" without any proof, putting the burden on someone else to prove them wrong, which will never happen because it's something they need to figure out on their own, something they can't do because they don't see it worthwhile in the first place (and hence their initial statement). Kind of "while True do" loop, that can only be broken by an exception.

[Zath]

I think the comparisons of current Lazarus / Delphi to Delphi 3, 4 etc. has some merit in as much as you could probably programmatically achieve similar results with both.
Newer software is ready for modern requirements with modern, ready-made components etc. but are we saying that it's not possible for a proficient coder to "code" a usable app for today with Delphi 3, even if the code is twice as long ?

All that said, I'd choose Lazarus over D3 every day of the week for the very reasons mentioned above in that it has far more components, functions etc. all ready for modern requirements which help nooby programmers like me.

For the record, the last version of Delphi I bought was Delphi 5 Enterprise. Itself little more than a newer version of Delphi 3 with more Client / Server options.

[Akira1364]

To redirect to the original subject of the thread, I think the sale is GREAT news! In my opinion Embarcadero is a transparently greedy company with a delusional, cringe-worthy, almost cult-like self-image of how important they are as an organization in the grand scheme of things. Which is to say, for example, they make insane, cartoonishly ludicrous claims such as having "Three Million Users Worldwide!" and honestly expect people to take them seriously. And that's not even getting into the actual technical quality of Delphi... I mean Delphi 10 Seattle, the latest version, which was aggressively marketed as being "Windows 10 Ready!" REQUIRES you to have .NET Framework 3.5 and MSBuild 12.0 installed, both of which are now outdated and do NOT come standard with any Windows 10 installation. Even if you have the up to date .NET Framework 4.6 and MSBuild 14.0, you still have to go out of your way to install the old versions thanks to Embarcadero's engineers being incapable of keeping up with the times.

All of this said, go FPC/Lazarus! So much better, with a $0 cost.

[x2nie]

There was a great discussion (although outdated), which IMHO relevant yet with this thread topic 
here http://stevepeacocke.blogspot.co.id/2013/05/delphi-why-wont-it-just-die.html