Delphi XE2

[GWarner]

I used to have an interest in Delphi because I'd heard that it was derived from Turbo Pascal and I learned my programming techniques from Pascal so I never got into the habit of using gotos and of always defining things before I used them.

But from what I've heard Delphi has strayed well away from it's Pascal roots and barely resembles it anymore so I lost interest in it. And I've also heard that ever since Delphi was no longer a Borland product it became very pricey. Both good reasons, to me, to avoid it. I'll take Visual C++ and PureBasic over today's Delphi any day.

[luis]

Indeed I do. If an empty executable is 1.2mb, can't imagine what a big project's gonna be like.

You can't look at the output of an empty project and extrapolate linearly from that.
The right way to do is to compile increasingly complex projects using incrementally more and more libraries functions and see how it grows, and than doing the same with another language/compiler.

It's totally possible have a empty project of 1 mega and one of the most complex programs only 3 times that, or a empty one of 1 mega and the complex one of 10 mega.

And all this not talking about how much this is really important compared to (for example) the productivity of the language, in the end.

[luis]

I used to have an interest in Delphi because I'd heard that it was derived from Turbo Pascal

I used Turbo Pascal 3.0 in DOS. It was a .COM !
Editor, compiler and linker all in one COM.
The first compiler after TP3 that was able to give me the same thrill was PB
Well compared to TP3 is practically BLOATED but the experience is close.

[Polo]

Indeed I do. If an empty executable is 1.2mb, can't imagine what a big project's gonna be like.

You can't look at the output of an empty project and extrapolate linearly from that.
The right way to do is to compile increasingly complex projects using incrementally more and more libraries functions and see how it grows, and than doing the same with another language/compiler.

It's totally possible have a empty project of 1 mega and one of the most complex programs only 3 times that, or a empty one of 1 mega and the complex one of 10 mega.

And all this not talking about how much this is really important compared to (for example) the productivity of the language, in the end.

Of course, though I consider that if a project has only one empty window, the executable should only contain what is required to open that window, nothing more - that's what Purebasic does, that's clearly what Delphy does not.

[Kuron]

I used Turbo Pascal a lot back in the DOS days. Delphi did not stray from its Pascal roots as much as it was an Object Pascal. Object Pascal is different from Pascal in many of the same ways an OOP BASIC is different from a non OOP BASIC.

I got a lot of use out of Delphi 1 & 2 back in the day. Delphi 1 was 16-bit and Delphi 2 was 32-bit. I made a lot of money from products that were made in these languages. Back then, they were much better than Microsoft's offering. VB 3 & VB 4 had runtimes it relied on that were not distributed with the OS. VC++ was in its infancy and most people were using another C++ variant back then.

Unfortunately, after XP hit, Delphi started having compatibility problems with theming and Delphi started moving to being .NET based to compete with MS's languages. Between Delphi focusing on .NET, switching hands and continually being marketed via different methods and prices, the Delphi I loved is long gone.

I went from Delphi to VB 6 and once MS all but killed VB, I went the indie language route.

[nase09]

Bottom line. Talking about Delphi is really off topic... but its just ugly, slow and causes migraine.
Purebasic is the best, the sooner you realize that the better for man kind.

Delphi slow ? Ridiculous. Its produces extremely well optimized code (in most cases). Of course if you're into graphics-Stuff, Delphi can be 'slow' - Delphi was not designed for such things. (Embarcadero wants to change this now..)
Ugly and causes migraine ?? I DO like the IDE very much (e.g. Delphi's Form-Designer is much better than PB's Visual Designer). And with Delphi you're able to get a very clean an professional looking app in no time. (Of course there is bad looking Delphi stuff too, Delphi is(/was) widely spread (its sooo easy to handle, even kids use it ) and it exists for over 15 years now (Windows 3.1 apps didn't look very nice in general..). And I guess if you try, youll find some ugly looking Purebasic-Apps as well
Sadly some Delphi versions were worse than others.. I still use Delphi7 (and Delphi3) because I don't like the successors. (And the 'price policy' was(/is) not very clever I think..)

But XE2 is an interesting product for sure. I enjoyed myself with XE2 for some time, playing around with 'HD Apps', 3D, 64bit.. but I guess Embarcadero has overtaxed itself. There are bugs you come across very soon, and the executable size even for small projects is really pretty bad (see below).
Until I really need Unicode (or e.g. 64bit) I'll stick to the great Delphi 7. (And for some projects I use PUREBASIC, of course

Update : After testing some more, XE2 feels pretty immature. Firemonkey (scalable Windows/IOS 'HD'-apps) still in Beta-State
(VCL apps(the 'normal' 32 and 64 bit Windows applications) do better)
If you're interested in filesize, expect small projects ('hello world',few buttons/controls on a single Window, compiler/linker 'bloat-opts' disabled) to be :

• VCL 32bit: 1.6 MB
  VCL 64bit: 2.0 MB
  (replacing the default icon could save ~300KB)
  Firemonkey 32bit: 3.3 MB
  Firemonkey 64bit: 4.2 MB
  iOS : 4.6 MB

On WinXP(sp3)/Win7 no extra stuff(Dlls or installed .Net) is needed, to run your XE2 executables.
(Same setup, Delphi 7 : 390KB, Delphi 3 : 200KB )