[DUG] More Delphi news...

[John Bird]

I don't mean that Borland/Devco should spend effort on the Linux side - but
make it easier for people like the Lazarus project to do that part....

A sort of commercial contract along the lines of:
"We will agree on helping each other make a standard VCL Delphi portable -
you do the linux and OSX sides, we will help with the Windows side. Devco
could help with standards and design conversion/portability tools or
wizards."

On the Windows side there could end up being say 3 flavours:

-Free Lazarus VCL compatible (slow compiler, large exes etc)

-A Delphi lite compiler/linker supplied by Devco fir Windows lazarus - say
priced at $40 or like Delphi Personal edition
 ie cheap!  Remember the effect that Turbo Pascal for $40 had?  This could
be plugged into the Lazarus IDE

-Full Delphi versions for commercial people at standard prices.

For a small (emphasis small- guidelines and tools) amount of helping other
people write the other OS versions you could end up with something lots of
people want.

Taking a longer view:

In hindsight some things are obvious - I remember after being familiar with
the early OS's Xenix/Unix/TSX/DOS/VMS/Netware that the best of them was VMS,
if only DEC had been smart enough to port it to other processors and price
it cheaper than anything comparable eg $200 they could be owning the PC
market now - as it is VMS and Vaxes and DEC are all forgotten names.  John
Cutler (chief architect) ended up writing Windows NT instead.  Minicomputers
basically died.  Few architects looking forward tend to see that everything
will become vastly cheaper and smaller than they are now and get overtaken
by events.  DEC ruled its niche of minicomputers (it was the 2nd biggest
computer company) for 20 years then went extinct.

Now is it possible that the laptop and desktop market might also die??

As I see it, as there are more mobile phones being sold (600 million/year)
compared to PCs (200 million) the next generation of computing that most
people will be using are the mobile phones as web browsing, email, music and
pictures, who is in the best OS and compiler position for these?   I think
whoever it is needs something way smaller than current OS's.  And the
compilers?  Who is doing these?  This is also the question for Devco - what
can we supply for mobiles environment as there is one huge but cheap and
mass market...

John


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy North [mailto:jeremy.north at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, 28 April 2006 11:08 a.m.
To: johnkbird at paradise.net.nz; NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List
Subject: Re: [DUG] More Delphi news...


> So is this a fair wish list for Devco????:
>
> -Ability to compile standard VCL Delphi on Linux/Unix/OSX (even if 
> conversion tools needed - ie sort of automate it)

No thanks. I don't think the market is large enough to be sustained and to
work on the other things in your list and still be afloat after a year.
Kylix cost borland big time. Could we blame borland for switching focus
after that screw up?

> -64 bit compiler

Yes

> -Full Unicode support

Yes. Danny spoke of unicode win64 vcl but now he has gone lets hope that
win32 vcl is also unicode. The IDE is unicode so there is really no excuse
not to make the vcl unicode and more and more unicode support is added to
the VCL with each release. Heck there is a japanese version of the product.

> -.NET V2 and V3 support

Yes

> -Another way to achieve cross platform GUI is to have the screen stuff 
> being displayed in a browser.  Might be another way to get to the 
> first point above.  Once I started Windows programming I was pretty 
> disgusted that the API interfaces for writing to the screen, the 
> printer and the browser have no relation to each other at all.  That 
> must be one of the dumbest fundamental design faults.

So do mono with ASP.NET or Chrome or C#.

>  I have been very impressed by the slick UI in applications like Gmail 
> and Google Calendar - they behave and appear like a good Windows App - 
> the Calendar has mouse drag for start and finish times one the screen 
> etc, and the screen updates look very efficient.

I use gmail heaps and it is not a patch on my native email client. Better
than what they used to be though.

> Maybe others could give their ratings on how important these are - I 
> have done only English Delphi so I am not sure how important the 
> Unicode one is...

Unicode is huge and is really needed. Apparently it isn't as important for
folks in the US though. Which is hard to take considering Europe is where
Delphi is most popular.

cheers,
Jeremy


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