Linux is coming in the next release - there will be a blog on that soon. It already has Mac, iOS, and Android on top of its Windows support.
Honestly, I do not believe that Python or Tcl/Tk count as "good" RAD cross-platform tools. Only if you've never used something like modern Delphi to compare them to. We regularly have customers give feedback about their productivity with Delphi/C++Builder, versus Python, C#, etc, and they say they get apps completed and released twice as fast or often more. "5x" is quoted often in our marketing material, and that number is not marketing, it's based on numbers people tell us.
- David (one of the PMs at Embarcadero; I work with the blog author Marco.)
Developing on Linux desktop at that time probably wasn't ready for this.
There was a particularly big flap over them not stripping the corporate audit clause from the free Kylix Open Edition version targeted at OSS dev; and another regarding enforcing the mandatory "Made with Kylix Open Edition" splash screen that was linked into your app at the compiler level, since all the library code was technically modifiable per licensing.
I also seem to recall that they managed to standardize on Red Hat 7.2, which I think had the much maligned gcc 2.96 fork in it and possibly an older glibc, and then had problems with later kernel/glibc/something along those lines versions such that you were locked into the "bad" version of Red Hat using it.
I probably have some of the tech details jumbled 16 years later, but the TL;DR was that the development community for Linux is nothing like the development community for Windows, especially back then. There were simply different cultural expectations and a hugely diverse set of environments to target, along with a swiftly moving ecosystem to link against.
Upshot, Kylix more or less flopped and Borland switched gears to Java/JBuilder-based IDEs for C++ compilation (C++BuilderX), then back around full circle later focusing on single-platform IDEs for .NET/native Windows.
The last time I used Delphi it was on version 5. I never used anything for desktop GUIs on Python or Tcl/Tk (or any other language) that comes even close to it. That requirement of "modern" is too outreaching.
But I'm impressed by Python's kivy (but still didn't really use it), and there are some interesting things happening on Haskell circles. I'm optimist in that Delphi's decades old title may fall soon.
It is a nice start again though.
To each his own. I work in a cross platform world with a roughly equal mix of Linux and Windows and my personal preferences are with the standard Unix toolset.
That's why I wrote "in combination with easy deployment". Yes, you can do faster RAD in Python but good luck with easy deployment.
Tk is the better than Delphi RAD tool?
It is a very simple, script language that allows creating dynamic GUIs on the fly. I can make a simple GUI and hang calls on buttons and menus with a few lines of text. No compiling. No library mismatches to deal with. Whiteboard sketch to a working prototype often takes less than an hour, almost never more than a day.
It is cross platform and text based, so we can email prototypes around for people to try it on their Windows, Linux and Mac machines, click on buttons and report what they want to change. It is text, and does not require installing software. This is a noticeable advantage in locked-down environments, where installing Tk once and running 10 scripts is much easier than installing 10 revs of software.
Due to the language simplicity we had people who said they have no idea about it (and no plans to learn it -- they just wanted a prototype) making and sending back mods within a few days of getting the prototype. This is great -- then we know that this is what they want.
Tk is long in the tooth and has many limitations, but for rapid GUI prototyping it is one of the most useful tools for me.
Very limited ones. And ones clients will have a shock when seeing. And still coding it all together.
With Delphi you can drag and drop great looking (and more full featured) prototypes in zero time.
It will be limited to Windows, though, I'll give you that.
Can you clarify "coding it all together" part. I have no idea what you meant.
Of course for more than trivial built-in behaviours you'll be writing code, but for a UI prototype, especially if it's just CRUD forms etc., you can get it built in a few minutes with no code. Drop a database connection component and set the connection properties, and you'll get live data and properly typed and bound controls on the form too.
Compilation takes fractions of a second, so that's not an impediment to design iteration - but you don't need to compile or run to see what it looks like since it's effectively a WYSIWYG form designer.
[Edit: hit reply too soon] Tk model of UI programming does not promote this that much, because causing stuff to happen by writing code is the default way. Also Tk-style approach of writing GUI definitions in code and letting the toolkit to deal with details like positioning (in fact, using HTML for UI is mostly similar) is more productive.
I really wish HTML was as easy to design with as the VCL designer. Trying to e.g. create vertically centered children is far, far easier in the VCL than in HTML + CSS.
Rather, it'll be limited to Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. :)
I can throw together a very nice looking GUI app in one sitting in Delphi, where laying out the elements and binding and defining events is absolutely trivial.
In Python, with Tcl/Tk, I don't. I use C#, qt, or even flask. Tcl/Tk is absolutely not appropriate for RAD GUI development, unless it's at some hello world level of complexity.
Further, there are several experimental projects that support running Tcl/Tk over HTTP/HTML rather than X11, Win32, SDL, the current Mac OS X/macOS GUI system.
TkWeb and WubTk are examples of this.
- It was a wrapper around Qt
- Had some dependencies on Wine
- The set of available controls was small
- It was closed source
- They expected GNU/Linux developers to be willing to pay for it
20 years ago, RAD meant that you could drop visual components on a form, add some events, set some properties, and hit the green run button to compile and run it.
A very visual way of programming.
QtCreator with it's visual designer comes close, but then you have to suffer a more unforgiving syntax (C++), a complex macro compiler (MOC) and not at all easy cross-compilation / distribution.
Netbeans Swing support also comes close.
Borland also had the older Turbo Vision toolkit, but that was for MS-DOS. OWL was designed a very similar class hiearchy.
:)
TCL/TK is about 20 years old if not more.
As the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em...
That said, it was 20 years ago. Now there are IMO much better cross platform tools for RAD (Python, Tcl/Tk, ...) and Delphi is showing its age (no Linux targets?). Unless I have to live in a Pascal world there are much better tools today. My 2c.