Ex-Borland's Delphi owner re-ignites cross-platform dream

Exactly

And since Delphi already is the fastest development platform, the time is right to focus on native multi platform development.

Bring it on...

Kylix was to ambitious and ahead of its time, if they do manage to add cross platform then they're all but guaranteed to re-ignite the Delphi flame and attract back all the developer who left after Borland screwed up.

Bugs a go go

Well I bought Kylix - wrote most of our hotel management and pos software with it and still use it although Lazarus looks to be less bug ridden and more importantly not obsolete.

One of the main problems with Kylix is that is was only certified to work on distros of Linux which were old when Kylix came out and are now really old. With a bit of fiddling it's possible to get it to work on other distros, but it's an uphill struggle. Any software that allows Pascal/Delphi programming on Linux is welcome here!

I am that developer...

Ah, the Borland days... coding for Paradox db and having to ship the compiler with your product to get that to work... then Kylix failed to take its place where QT now lives.

Aww, what's the point. Android looks like it's going to wipe 'em all out... ;)

Inprise - Horseman of the Apocalypse

Borland's strength and beauty was always being the best toolkit in the desktop developer's market. Pushing Delphi and siblings into the middleware & enterprise markets was a typical "idea in a suit" abortion. Going head-to-head with the likes of IBM, java etc was doomed from the start and everyone knew it.

Delphi was so good at those kind of small bespoke jobs that even a developer like myself who would rather stick needles in their eyes than code Pascal would use it for certain problems. That and the incredibly rich ecosystem of small shops providing components and libs, the ease of drilling down from RAD design, through the windows API, all the way to win32 asm if needed meant one could have performance-critical things like - for example - audio plugins looking beautiful and performing well in no time at all.

So Borland was maybe at home in a lot of niche markets, but so what? - it's still money in the bank at the end of the day, and better than having no money, no future, no developer base and being kicked around like a corporate football.

But but but

They way I read it they are talking about cross-development under windows for the other targets, not porting the IDE to Linux or Mac.

@AC 19:45

Nope, I still have a copy of Delphi before it got numbers (£250 in the late 80s?), and wrote some useful software in it. It was good for building tabbed dialogs, but not for serious WIMP stuff, 'cos it got a lot harder to eg drag off a large window and scroll arbitrary graphics or components on it.

As you suggest I can write PHP, but can also do Perl, Python, Algol, Fortran, Java, PL/SQL, VB, C, C++, C#, Z80, 6502, 8088/6 ... Pentium, 6800 / 68000 family & ARM Assembler, Pascal, Delphi, Ruby, C++ Builder, Rebol, Lua, Lisp, Forth, Prolog & Cobol. I have probably missed a couple, but I am getting on a bit. My first job involved writing in 8-bit machine code, and I went to the Macintosh launch on my 25th birthday.

Yes, Delphi is a great programming language, fast as crap and not a bad choice for writing a desktop application. It's well understood by one percent of the programming population and for that reason unsuited for enterprise use despite its technical merits.

ps how is DLL hell these days? Haven't had it since moving to web pages! To be fair there are other issues, mostly caused by M$oft.

Big bet on re-ignition

This is going to be a hard re-ignition. I don't see potential market in cross-platform IDE. Moving forward, I see people would not mind to write their application in any language and any platform, especially for server application. Why? Because we have virtualisation and services interopability. I also don't see any major advantage of having a cross-platform IDE for developing desktop application. Why? Because every platform has their own best IDE. If you want to develop a Windows application, use Visual Studio, there are tons of .NET libraries available that will work really well in Windows 7. If you want to develop a Mac application, use XCode, again, tons of libraries available. Creating "many" shares library may not maximize the platform capability.

Additionally, Microsoft optimize their .NET framework to improve the "performance" and "re-usability" - with quote as I don't know how true this is, but I am sure that with faster hardware, they will definitely improve something. Today, the .NET framework is working with C++, C# and VB language, and for developing desktop, client/server, web services, web application, etc.

I agree with the word "betting" used in the article, I think they should re-assess the success probability by looking at MONO and Java.

REALbasic

REALbasic ( www.realsoftware.com ) has been offering cross-platform development, Windows, Linux and Mac ( both native IDE's and cross-compilation ) for ages. Not always brilliantly ( I binned an early edition in absolute frustration ) but it has really improved in recent years.

It carries the "Basic" stigma which drives 'real programmers' [sic] apoplectic but it's easy to use and a natural progression for past VB6'ers who flinch at dotNet. Of course, that's another reason for 'real programmers' to diss it, but what do I care about narrow minded attitudes when my cross-platform apps are making real money and keeping people in jobs.

Good luck ( seriously, not sarcastically ) to anyone who wants to widen the cross-platform market.

Price is the killer.

Delphi rocks, but the price sucks balls. If they would just make one version and then bring the price down to about $2-300 per copy they'd probably sell 10 times as many equalling the profit they're aiming for now.

But the difference is it would make it WAY more attractive to new-comers (and people who left for cheaper pastures), therefore bulding the user-base and community back up, making it MORE appealing for even MORE new-comers.

It just sucks that it has to cost like $1300 for the average single developer to be able to use Delphi for things like micro-startups and internal usage in a small company, which is where the roots of Delphi took hold from my experience since TP7.

Prices like $250+ for quality add-on component sets wouldn't be such a kick in the face after dropping $1300 for the IDE. If Delphi was cheaper there'd be more money left for the component creators, so they'd sell more, and make more/better components, growing Delphi's abilites further and expanding the community (again back to more sales of Delphi, repeat)

I think alot of why people think nobody is using Delphi is becuase everyone goes "WTF kind of price is that?!" and decide to priate it instead of buying it, and from there keep it on the down-low as to the tool they're using to avoid the cops. ;)