[Joker_vD]

I remember back when I was programming in Delphi I could link directly against a .dll, just take a function prototype from the .h file and translate it into a function declaration like this one:

    function I2C_GetNumChannels(out numChannels: Longword): FT_Result; stdcall; external 'libmpsse.dll';

and that was it; but to do this in MSVC you needed not only the .h header and the .dll itself, you also needed that stupid .lib file that had AFAYCT had literally nothing inside it except symbol entries that said "no, load it dynamically from this .dll on startup, please". So it was a rather common source of amusement for Delphi programmers that paradoxically, it was harder to link a program written in C against a DLL written in C than it was to link a program written in Delphi against a DLL written in C.

[FpUser]

Delphi made an awful lot of things incredibly easy. Com automation for example. It is just too bad Borland had fucked up.

[pjmlp]

It boggles my mind that for how hardline the WinDev is about using COM, they still fail to match Borland, nowadays Embarcadero tooling for COM.

For a brief moment they almost had it with .NET Native and C++/CX, and then, first they killed C++/CX in name of C++/WinRT (with VS tooling just like in the good old ATL days), and with UWP's deprecation, CsWinRT also fails quite short of the .NET Native experience in regards to COM.

How a OS development team that is so invested into COM APIs, fails to produce tooling better than the competition for 25 years escapes me.

[FpUser]

>"It boggles my mind that for how hardline the WinDev is about using COM, they still fail to match Borland, nowadays Embarcadero tooling for COM."

I've been in the industry for 30 years just in Canada. Have come to conclusion that software developers in their majority rarely prefer most efficient, elegant (whatever that means) ways of accomplishing things. I have a theory that being "software developer" is sort of self servant. Because of that they enjoy unneeded complexity, tooling etc. etc.

I personally have never indulged into coding for the sake of it. To me software development was always just a tool to build amazing products people / businesses would use. So I always think about product, how it will be used and how to get there with the least financial "damage" either for my own company or for a client.

[pjmlp]

I share a similar feeling, from my point of view developers are users as well, and we should enjoy similar nice workflows as regular users.