Re:Why I am called "the Father of Visual Basic" (1996)
by pjmlp on Thursday March 19, 2015 @06:46AM
(#9231096)
On Windows, Borland was always late with SDK support so we were forced to write our own wrappers. I gave up by Delphi 1.0, after being mainly focused on Turbo Pascal since the 5.5 version.
Regarding Kylix, I would say it was badly managed from the start.
So yeah, eventually the way out for better Windows support was C++/MFC, as even Borland's C++ compilers had their own set of issues.
But, this is a big but, if Borland managed to push Delphi the same way Sun pushed Java, then I think the mindshare story would be quite different.
A memory safe programming language, with RAD tooling support, capable of system programming tasks with native executables.
The native OS interfaces on popular platforms (Win32, Posix) were in C, so it would have always been a 2nd class citizen.
I believe that Delphi was already on a decline when Borland decided to self destruct.
On Win32, they had a tough time competing after VisualBasic v5.0, where Microsoft had a larger mind-share.
On Linux, I had hopes with the Kylix port, but it was abandoned by Borland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylix_(software)