Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by andrewwharton 2686 days ago
We're in the process of migrating off a 4+ million line Delphi application that basically runs the whole business, but it's a 10+ year project to "grind the monolith", so who knows when we'll actually be done. In the meantime, we don't have much choice but to keep paying the licensing costs...
2 comments

What do you migrate to over a period of 10 years that won't be obsolete 1/3 the way through that effort??

As much as I love making old code new I'm not sure I could stomach a 10 year project.

Microservices, essentially.

It's not really 1 x ten year project as such, but heaps of smaller 3-6 month projects (many running in parallel) to add chunks of new functionality (as microservices) and rewrite parts of the monolith that we can cleanly cleave off.

New parts of UI that are needed don't get added to the Delphi app, but get built as web pages (using React mostly at the moment), which get launched in Chrome windows from the Delphi application.

One day our Delphi app will be an empty shell of it's former self and we can have a huge decommissioning ceremony (party!), but that day's still a long way off... :)

Out of curiosity, have you evaluated a migration to lazarus?