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Comment by amenod | Hacker News Reader

I think the $1000 price tag is totally wrong. I would never pay that kind of money for an IDE unless it was _really_ better than anything else. But this means:

  - the language has huge community (so I'm not stuck with a dying language)
  - it allows me to do anything (huge extensibility)

Unfortunately it is difficult to change the pricing model once you have existing clients. On one hand they are the only ones paying for your development, so you can't lower the price tag. On the other hand building a bigger community takes time, and it won't happen at this price. So unless they become really creative, Delphi won't survice. Pity, I have used it (yeeeears ago) and it was a brilliant product for building UIs, very easy to use and powerful. Haven't seen anything similar since.

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The pricing model is the main reason newer people are not getting into Delphi. This is why they tried to lure people with iOS and Android capabilities. But when there are alternatives that are free, why bother?

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.

"Delphi has a Community Edition now (which is free), but the fact that are excluded from a large portion of the library"

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...

You are correct, saying 'large portion of the library' was a mistake. But as I remember, you don't have access to the VCL source code with the Community Edition. The feature matrix says that this is 'limited in Community', whatever that means.

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.

[0] https://github.com/stijnsanders/TMongoWire

You are right about MongoDB... as for "VCL source code" it is available, but with licensing limitations

Oh FireDAC is no longer available for Professional version either? Geez.. really not going to lay down $3k for an EE.

How is that "professional" if you cannot even read/write to sqlite.

This is incorrect. I have Pro. I use FireDAC. SQLite can be used with Pro.

@fmxexpress thanks for the info. That's exactly what I am doing now, but I am not on the latest version.

Both Professional and Community Edition include FireDAC.

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.

Ah ok, it doesn't mention FireDAC, fair enough. At least you can save data in a database.

Thanks for the correction.

unfortunately "Enterprise DBs" means also Postgresql, Mysql, SQL Server etc. (anything Client/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 ...

As a person who has used Delphi since around 1997 and Turbo Pascal I find it frustrating and extremely disappointing that people like Marco Cantu who are leading figures in the Delphi community do not do enough to criticize the absolutely crazy Delphi pricing and products such as this ludicrous "community" edition with the $5K/year limitation.

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.

Yes, thank goodness for FreePascal/Lazarus.

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.

They have macOS64 on their roadmap. I agree though that they should keep up with the macOS support better than they do. Even if it is probably the smallest platform by marketshare they support.

@fmxexpress you are showing up marked dead here.

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.

Their community edition is kind of a joke when compared to Microsoft's VS Community Edition which basically brings everything.

Does VS Community Edition let a developer compile to Android/iOS/macOS32/Windows with a single codebase and single UI? I've used Xamarin and it doesn't really seem to do that.

Depends on what you use. You could use Cordova instead, but I'm not primarily a mobile developer. I'm mostly web / back-end.

I mean companies pay that and more to become Microsoft shops, at least before .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, and this isn'. I agree entirely with you. I would love to learn Delphi from a hobbyist perspective, can I get a license for like $299 or around that range? No? Hell why isn't there a freebie edition 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.

Since July last year, a free Community Edition of both Delphi and C++ Builder has been available. Feature wise, it is essential the Professional edition with a few license limitations.

Delphi does compile to Linux. With the FMXLinux third party add on the Delphi FireMonkey framework compiles apps to iOS/Android/Windows/macOS32/Linux with a single UI and single codebase.

Delphi community edition includes Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, with FireDAC database access and full access to the source for the VCL, FMX & RTL. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

Basically everything in Professional, but free for hobbyists.

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