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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

I have Lazarus up and running... it's currently taking 32 Megabytes of RAM. It compiles in the blink of an eye, has one of the best possible 2 way GUI builders in the open source world, and I can reach back 30 years into the libraries I wrote in the days of Turbo Pascal 7/MS-DOS and pretty much use them intact.

It amazes me how many people went with the .NET bloatware and all that follows it. Of course, 95% of programmers out there are newer than me and don't have knowledge of this type of efficiency to compare against.

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You have to thank Borland's management for that.

Delphi and C++ Builder are still around, but now only some lucky enterprise employees get to play with them.

.NET Native and C++/CX were finally shaping up to be Microsoft's proper version of what .NET and Visual C++ should have been all along.

However they are the most recent victims of the whole Reunion reboot, .NET Native now has uncertain future, while C++/CX got replaced by C++/WinRT with a tooling at the same level as doing C++ ATL 2.0 in 2000.

Still, there is a certain guarantee of the underlying platform and respective languages being around.

Borland mismanagement was my hard lesson to only use tools from platform vendors. Not only did they decide to leave the indie developers, they were always late providing bindings to Microsoft SDKs.

At least there is a free Community Edition now. It is one release behind (so doesn't have the latest goodness, eg the LSP server for code completion), but it does let you build apps for non-commercial use or pre-income startups for free, using Delphi/C++, the VCL, etc. Ie, if you want to encourage people to use tools like Delphi, it is much more open to indie devs than it used to be.

Link: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

I am fully aware of it, but the damage has been done and very few will give it a second look, which is quite a produvity loss, but so is the circle of "innovation".

I've tried it a few times. The installation was very strange I remember having to reinstall a few times in order for it to work correctly.

Having had to use Embarcaderos Delphi, does anyone actually like that? It may be resource friendly as if it's still 2000, but the rest of the experience the same. Pascal is ageing and it shows, Embarcaderos IDE is the worst I've ever had to deal with and click and drag GUI, is it really so pleasant to work with? I find it easier to layout a Qt app. Visually or in code.

They are making it easy to get started with when there is a whole bunch of information I have to give them in order to download even a trial/community edition. Contrast that to most other programming languages / development environments, where you usually can just download and run it.

  Field required:  First Name 
  Field required:  Last Name 
  Field required:  Email 
  Field required:  Password 
  Field required:  Verify Password 
  Field required:  Company 
  Field required:  Phone 
  Field required:  I have read the Community Edition End User License Agreement and confirm that my usage of the Community Edition version complies with its terms and conditions.
  Field required:  I have read, understand and agree to Embarcadero's Terms and Conditions & Privacy Statement
  Field required:  Yes, I would like to receive marketing communications regarding Embarcadero products, services, and events. I can unsubscribe at any time.

Contrast that to most other programming languages / development environments, where you usually can just download and run it.

There are, sadly, other offenders too. Microsoft is possibly the worst among them. Gone are the days of being able to use a free edition of Visual Studio to develop Windows applications with no strings attached. And good luck even figuring out what the privacy policy is, a problem that also applies with VS Code. I mean, why should desktop software even need a privacy policy?! Oh, right, telemetry, the plague of 21st century software. And then you have the mobile platforms and the offensive conditions and financial cut demanded by their gatekeepers, keeping Microsoft company in the obnoxious developer experiences department.

Meanwhile, OSS development tools and open platforms seem to be blowing away much of the proprietary stuff in administrative and business terms (as well as often in technical terms) now. Too many greedy platform owners trying to lock everyone in, not realising that Ballmer was right all along and without developers their platform is worthless anyway. And discussions like this, and the emphasis today on cloud-hosting (usually running FOSS) and web apps, are the result.

While bringing developers to the stone age before RAD tooling was a thing.

Because when one designs languages over weekends and late nighters, state of the art GC, JIT and GUI tooling are at very deep bottom of their roadmaps.

So thank you very much, but I will keep enjoying Java, .NET and C++ based tooling.

I think newer languages like Rust and Go are obvious counterexamples to your stereotype there. Heck, even JS and Python are. The runtimes, tools, libraries and overall developer experience for languages like these are easily on par with the Java or Microsoft ecosystems today, and in some respects far superior. They are all freely available without any strings attached, and they all work well on open platforms like Linux as well as Windows or Apple desktops.

I'm confused

Why would someone both give up the ease of use and power of VB6 and/or Delphi / Lazarus, and want the bloat of Java, .NET, C++, etc.. that just complicate things for no good reasons?

It's like the programmers of the world went insane somewhere around 2002.

What is so complicated about .NET or Java?

> always late providing bindings to Microsoft SDKs

I remember Delphi adding many Windows features before Visual Studio. Windows Vista Aero support, Support for building native apps for the Microsoft Store, etc.

Delphi never shipped with bindings for 100% of the APIs, but the beauty of Delphi was I could create my own bindings with only a little code from Delphi, so it wasn't a roadblock. That is the huge difference between Delphi and non-native development tools: You aren't held back by lack of libraries or API bindings.

Delphi never had proper support for Metro, initially they faked it with VCL styles.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9653260/resources-for-na...

Also how come Embarcadero supports Windows features before Microsoft does?

I am a big Object Pascal/C++ Buider fan, but also acknowledge the reality of their actual support.

Borland dragging their feet on 64 bit support helped me win quite a few customers from one of my competitors.

> but now only some lucky enterprise employees get to play with them.

LOL, "lucky enterprise" my ass. The only poor souls who still work with that shitty bug ridden stone-age IDE from Embarcadero have to do that because they never managed to get rid of VCL (which might have been nice 20 years ago. Today it's just bad compared to modern frameworks).

Stay away from Embarcadero, don't become dependent on such vendor lock-in.

.NET Native is an absolute nightmare in practice. Glacial compile times (I’ve heard many people complain that their Azure DevOps CI times out after an hour), and so many bugs that you only discover at runtime. I gave up on .NET Native after discovering that it can’t even handle the ultra-popular Dapper ORM.

While I like the idea of .NET AOT, the execution left so much to be desired. The developer experience is so bad that I’m shocked that it’s still required for Store UWP apps.

Well, if you have been following up on blogs, community videos and github issues, most likely by the time .NET 6 comes out, the stack will look like Windows 7 development model never went away and the only improvement was replacing COM with the improvements brought by UWP.

With the store sandboxing Win32 apps instead.

https://github.com/dotnet/designs/blob/main/accepted/2020/fo...

https://github.com/microsoft/ProjectReunion

My biggest grip with .NET, since 2001 alphas for MSFT partners, was not being AOT like Delphi (NGEN was never meant for anything other than fast startups).

Why is it we always keep going in circles, when .Net was seemingly, finally on the right path they changed again and it seems to be going in the old .Net direction.

What is the point of AOT? xcopy + .NET Framework worked perfectly for what I used them.

> It amazes me how many people went with the .NET bloatware and all that follows it. Of course, 95% of programmers out there are newer than me and don't have knowledge of this type of efficiency to compare against.

It doesn't amaze me. It's very productive to work in and the bloat just doesn't matter that much in most environments where .NET is even on the table. Now that prevailing trends are different, you can build leaner .NET Core apps.

It's funny to see this comment, because Delphi and such were actually considered rather bloated back in the day --- a basic windowed app with not much in it (like a "Hello World") taking up several hundred KB was not unusual, compared to tens of KB for the MFC equivalent, and a few KB for pure Win32.

...and a computer having 32MB of RAM was considered outrageously luxurious.

They were using static linking by default though. You could always switch the linker to dynamic linking and get those sweet 20-something KiB binaries.

MFC with C++ was using dynamic linking by default, but you could always switch to static and see the binary bloat to several MiBs in size.

So if you do a proper comparison, there's really not much difference between them.

I did Delphi 7 back in the days, but not sure I understand your complaint: .NET desktop apps do compile and launch in seconds.

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