[zac23or]

I started using Delphi 3 and stopped at 7, migrating to web development (Rails, Django, etc.).

Delphi was magical. Nothing compares to Delphi's productivity. Rails is good, but it doesn't even come close to Delphi's productivity. People love Go's speed. Go is glacially slow compared to Delphi. The WYSIWYG form editor is incredible. I can use Delphi 3 on a Windows machine with 16 MB of RAM.

VCL is fantastic; the idea of components and memory management is incredible, simple, and it works.

Delphi is my first language; I studied VCL code and I love the code, the style. They were practical: Instead of Hash, they used TStrings (a list of strings) and the visual components also used them, like in the items of a Listbox!

Delphi could have been the platform for the web. Imagine a VCL for the web (VCLW), where you could change the target architecture or something like that and, presto, you'd have a web server running with VCL code!

That never happened. What happened was a series of bad ideas for the web, bad in their essence.

And Delphi invested in many projects doomed to failure, such as CORBA, three-tier architecture, MDA... Kylix!!!! Of course, Borland was very poorly managed. The CEOs were crazy. "Let's fight IBM." Delphi was abandoned. It's over.

I tried a new version of Delphi a few years ago. Wow, it was full of bugs! It had basic problems like compilation not working, Random crashing several times, etc. For me the new versions are just a way to profit from projects stuck in Delphi.

I tried Lazarus in the past, but it's extremely slow and I can't use my components in Lazarus without rewriting a lot of things.

To me, Delphi is languishing in an induced coma, breathing the air of the past, which is becoming increasingly rare. It's a shame.

[Aloha]

This so much.

We just got code complete on porting a 30 year old Delphi app to C#, because of all of this.

Even now, our pure Delphi components are performant and wonderful, but hiring people who want to learn or know Delphi is hard, so off to C# we trundle forward.

[storus]

Didn't the same people who wrote Delphi write also C# and .NET? When I first saw .NET it felt very much like VCL/CLX. And then came TypeScript from the same guy.

[ozim]

As much as I know the story MSFT was basically driving limousines in front of Borland headquarters and showering developers with money to jump the ship.

When web apps took off there was nothing that would save Delphi. Web stack was awful back then and I also enjoyed Delphi an building interfaces with it.

But web stack unfortunately had many more upsides than desktop apps and nowadays tooling for web sucks less.

[nurettin]

As someone who used delphi professionally for years, it feels like we lived in parallel universes.

> you'd have a web server running with VCL code!

Is this for real? Unigui has been around for over a decade. I've ported legacy vcl apps to web with it. Works with apache as well.

What's your grudge with kylix? Again, I've used it to deploy server side code, worked great as a data provider for visual components and as an http endpoint. No idea why anyone thought it was bad. The only problem was it being discontinued. But nobody at the time thought it was doomed or would be discontinued.

> tried Lazarus in the past, but it's extremely slow

No, fpc builds, optimizes and runs exactly like delphi. The problem with Lazarus is it is missing commercial tools like devexpress.

Also Lazarus had compiler bugs on arm32 which prevented us from using it in professional barcode readers.

And the whole recompiling your ide every time you added a new control got old fast.

So it is unused for entirely different reasons. I can't think of anything else that is bad about Lazarus.

> tried a new version of Delphi a few years ago. Wow, it was full of bugs! It had basic problems like compilation not working, Random crashing several times

From someone who used "new delphi" for years this part feels like it was made up on the spot! If you have a crash, it is usually you doing something wrong with your controls.

And the way to fix it is to run another delphi ide, attach your delphi ide instance to the debugger and find the point your stupid mistake crashed the ide. Takes 5 minutes.

Edit: Note to the uninitiated: the reason a control (a gui element) can crash the IDE is because of Delphi s design time. That allows you to view and use the control while designing the interface.

[zac23or]

> Unigui has been around for over a decade

Is it possible to take a VCL project, change some configuration, and turn it into a web server? Unigui is similar to Intraweb, isn't it? You need to recreate the project as a Unigui/Intraweb project.

> No, fpc builds, optimizes, and runs exactly like Delphi

It's not my experience. As an example: https://forum.lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php/topic,4958

> for years, this part feels like it was made up on the spot!If you have a crash, it is usually you doing something wrong with your controls.

No, I remember the event exactly. I saw a post about the community edition here, filled out the Embarcadero form, and downloaded it. No anything added to Delphi. And I had a bad experience with it.

I love Delphi. The best days of my life as a developer were spent using Delphi. But this does not solve the problems that Delphi and Embarcadero face.