- the language has huge community (so I'm not stuck with a dying language)
- it allows me to do anything (huge extensibility)
Yes, Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library, because you cannot afford it, is always going to alienate some people. And it is always going to feel frustrating, when other languages don't have those limitations.
My office only uses the Professional Edition, because we cannot really afford the Enterprise Edition, which means there were some problems we ended up 'inventing ourselves', because they were only available in the Enterprise Edition.
Delphi probably won't survive another decade (in my estimation), but Pascal will live on as FreePascal/Lazarus.
That's not really the case. With Delphi Community edition you get support for 4 operating systems, VCL and FireMonkey, it only lacks access to Enterprise databases like Oracle and some of the multi-tier architectures. Community has a large percentage (80%+) of the features...
We wanted to do MongoDB connections, which comes with FireDAC. But that's only available in the Enterprise Edition. So we ended up rewriting TMongoWire[0] to fit our needs.
I am sure you can do most things in Delphi in the Community edition, but it's a little too late, unfortunately.
How is that "professional" if you cannot even read/write to sqlite.
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions
"Build database apps with local/embedded connectivity" is in every edition.
The only difference is you need Enterprise or Architect to connect to "Enterprise class" databases like a remote Oracle server.
you can probably just use another Framework like (free) ZeosDB (http://zeoslib.sourceforge.net/)
or some paid ones e.g. from Devart (https://www.devart.com/dac.html)
but still, its frustrating to have to use something else for such basic functionality ...
Thanks for the correction.
Why would any company want to start developing in Delphi if the pricing/developer is suddenly going to jump to a ridiculously high number the moment they touch $5K/year limit?
But even the $5k/year limitation came in far too late.
I am very sad to see the way the Delphi community is languishing and slowly dying out.
Also have the Professional Edition and would update if only they took the macOS platform seriously. Again with this update, like the previous few, there are zero improvements for macOS.
Really regret to ever have invested any time (and money as I bought several updates) into their FireMonkey platform. It looks bad on macOS for not using native controls and it looks bad on Windows because the fonts are blurry.
With macOS only being 64 bits around the corner and openGL being declared end of life, one would expect to see some movement or improvements. Nope.
Yes, they have it on their roadmap for 2 years now. Doesn't offer a lot of confidence in that it will actually show up on time. Right now you cannot release a 32 bits app anymore in the apple app store.
So I'd argue that they are very late already. Who is going to invest time into a product you cannot release, but that -pinky promise- will be delivered before you can not even run existing 32 bits apps anymore.
Except, I can get all of Visual Studio for free for Community use, and yet I can't get a completely free edition of Delphi. I think I got a trial, and it failed to compile / run certain projects. It was basically crippleware for me, I couldn't get it to do a damn thing for a number of the projects it generated code for. I will say though, the IDE is fast as hell and it was a very tiny install.
I also would of loved them to have somewhat teamed up with the FPC group to make it so Delphi compiles for Linux in exchange for either monetary support for the FPC group, or enhancements that would make their compiler awesome.
Basically everything in Professional, but free for hobbyists.
The other guy wrote everything in gcode macros using notepad.
Lots of memories though. Giant Enterprise applications we created 20 years ago.
Have to admit I really prefer go and rust and python though. I think I still have all those Dr Dobbs in my basement too. :)
It was definitely cutting edge in the mid-90s, but it has not managed to keep with the times. Most Delphi developers rely on Indy, a third party library of various classes, that provide a lot of functionality the base library should have provided. And even Indy isn't that quick at picking up new features as the world moves on.
When Embarcadero took over from Borland around 2009, they clearly tried to move it on a direction that would encourage more developers. They created ways to build your Delphi application for iOS and Android, which was meant to get more people to write Delphi. It didn't, since the IDE still cost over $1,000 a year. I'd imagine the people who used that functionality were those who were already 'stuck' with Delphi.
Indeed, even as one who engages a lot in the Delphi community, mostly through necessity, notice that very few people join the community without having some legacy application to maintain. And the community as a whole is dwindling anyway.
Embarcadero should have focused on core aspects of the language, which they are finally getting around to. You can now declare variables in the middle of function? That's so 21st century! (Although the forward compiler can't figure it out, so you'll see a lot of red lines in your IDE if you do.)
I won't be writing Delphi professionally a lot longer, though. As I am taking a new job this March, where I am moving on to Go. So it's more a bittersweet good bye for me. Because Delphi is frustrating to work with on a daily basis, but there is a lot nice about it.