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by imagine99 1741 days ago
Delphi, believe it or not. Might even be the most mature and feature-rich of any of the technologies and frameworks mentioned here.

RAD Studio 11 just got released and allows native development for "all platforms" from a single codebase and GUI at the click of a button. [0]

I have ranted about and harshly criticised Embarcadero's misguided product policies as much as the next guy but that doesn't change the fact that Delphi is still the most mature and versatile Rapid (sic) Application Development environment out there, especially if UX and UI are important to you.

And the twenty-year old adage that you can knock out an MVP with a really nice and polished GUI in a Saturday afternoon is now even more true than ever.

In the end, a native binary with a small footprint (easily 1/100th the size of an Electron project) will fall out at the press of the F9 key and that's really something to behold...

The free Delphi community edition [1] might even offer all the features that you need, although I really wish Embarcadero would see the light already and sync its release cycle with the full version.

Delphi might not officially be regarded as hip or cool these days (mostly due to severely and ongoing errant product and community management by the company that makes it) but some great people and brilliant minds are associated with it and compared to the olden days Delphi is now somewhat of a secret underground Swiss army knife that ironically gets used now mainly in big and medium corporations.

I like to think its versatility combined with the fact that it's technically uncool and against the mainstream to do projects in Delphi these days might fit a hacker's (and HN user's) mindset very well...

[0] https://www.embarcadero.com

[1] https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter?aldSet=e...

3 comments

Have you tried Free Pascal with Lazarus[1]? How does it stack up compared to Delphi?

[1] https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

I like Lazarus and I think it's great and important that it exists, especially with Embarcadero refusing to recognise and take seriously the needs of a developer community outside of Fortune 500 orgs (I'm slightly exaggerating but not much).

Lazarus is Free Software, which is awesome, and its feature set is also mature and impressive (I wouldn't have thought that the project also has a 20+ year history already).

I do recommend it highly if you can't get your hands on Delphi, don't want to support Embarcadero's antics, or work with an open-source project anyway. Several major component developers, including the great guys at TMS with their cloud pack and Raspberry Pi components [0] make a ton of awesome components that are available for both Delphi and Lazarus and I can highly recommend them.

If you're operating in the commercial space and have a budget, a bigger team, strong network, database or certain other commercial requirements, you might appreciate the support options and greater choice of 3rd party components which can be installed in Delphi with just a click and that save just so, so much time in getting your product to market.

If you're learning or teaching the language, working in a small team or alone, or require a feature set fully supported by Lazarus or just like free software, I wholeheartedly recommend Lazarus as a great alternative indeed. If you're somehow in the middle, check out the Delphi Community Edition too and just find out what suits you better. I guess it also comes down to what you're used to...

[0] https://www.tmssoftware.com/site/products.asp?t=lcl

> take seriously the needs of a developer community outside of Fortune 500 orgs

Yeah no kidding. Last year I tried to download the trial of their paid C++ IDE. The licensing tool wouldn't work, and support never returned my emails. People complained in the official forum, no company response their either. I took that to mean "We see you as such a low-value potential customer, we won't lift a finger to get our own demo to work for you".

> The free Delphi community edition

For a moment I was tempted to look into Delphi again, as I have spend many years in that environment. However, I see now its free until you hit USD 5.000 revenue per year. Not 0 USD, not USD 50.000, but only USD 5.000. Yes, that is the Embercadero that I knew. Probably this 'free' edition is canceled next year. Would not be the first time...

Edit: yes, still only runs on Windows

Does the community edition work on linux, or compile to linux? The page says:

> Delphi Community Edition is a full featured IDE for building iOS, Android, Windows and macOS apps ...

But looking at the feature matrix for the full product it says:

> deploy to the platforms you need to support and with RAD Studio that includes Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and Linux!

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions

> Build Linux client / server applications (includes FMX GUI for Linux) The RAD Studio Linux Compiler enables compiling applications to popular Linux platforms. FireMonkey GUI for Linux extends the FireMonkey UI framework to provide full Linux GUI support.

Only offered on Enterprise ($4K) / Architect ($6K) editions.