[DUG] Cross platform musings

Thu Oct 15 17:13:42 NZDT 2009

More chocolate bars are sold than desktop PCs and energy drinks are a
massively growing market.

Perhaps Embarcadero should produce a version of Delphi that supports
chocolate bars and energy drinks?

Seriously - sales figures of those devices you mention surely reflect an
increase in the use of devices as casual technology by consumers and
supplemental devices within businesses (with a higher churn because desktop
PC's can be upgraded to stay current, where those other devices become
obsolete more quickly and can only be *replaced* in order to remain current
- that's why the manufacturers love them so!).

Now certainly it would be nice if Delphi could be used to deliver
applications into that supplemental space, except that the money that
consumers in particular are then prepared to pay for applications on those
devices is such that Delphi would have to be a LOT cheaper, if not FREE for
it to be viable to target that market.  Don't make the "even 1% of billions
is worth it" mistake.  My understanding is that it's a myth in practice.

And I don't see how this affects the use of computers in business and the
demand for the types of applications that Delphi has successfully delivered
to date, but which now need to evolve to the next (or should I say
*current*) generation of technology that is relevant to *those* types of
applications.

And the danger is that if Delphi ceases to be relevant in that space that it
previously thrived in, I don't think it will have long enough to establish
itself in those new spaces in order to survive the transition (especially
since there are already cheaper alternatives).

Are you seriously suggesting that an iPod or similar is ever going to
replace the desktop PC in the accounts department?  CAD?  Chem-informatics?
Data processing?  DTP?

These technologies will supplement that technology, not replace it.

Microsoft left an open goal in the WINDOWS native code development market.
It looked like Embarcadero were finally going to capitalize on that
opportunity missed by Borland except now it seems they were heading toward
their OWN goal the whole time.

From: delphi-bounces at delphi.org.nz [mailto:delphi-bounces at delphi.org.nz] On
Behalf Of John Bird
Sent: Thursday, 15 October 2009 4:46 p.m.
To: NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List
Subject: [DUG] Cross platform musings

The reason I see a decreasing use of desktops (and Windows) is multiple:

1 - Most pcs are getting smaller.  The fastest growing areas of sales are in
laptops and netbooks these days.  As these get smaller and more powerful
more and more users find they do not need anything more, and they are now
comparable in price.

2 - Even faster growing is mobiles.  The highest customer satisfactions
ratings I read recently are from those with (1) iPhones and (2) Android
phones.

Once serious computers become portable then there are a whole new world of
issues to solve to do with screen layout, mutlitasking or single tasking,
input devices, battery life, memory size etc.   Windows and other desktop OS
are not really well suited for that transition, especially Windows as it is
for current state of the art desktops and laptops, not really suited to
netbooks and low ppwer devices - it needs mainly Mains power or heavy
batteries for hot processors and large amounts of memory.   However with the
iPhone SDK  (which must have a lot of OSX ancestry in it as it runs on a
flavour of OSX) and Android (which must have a good ancestry in linux which
it is a version of) - these are environments to target from the beginning.
not sure about Windows mobile, but it does not seem to get the best press as
it is not really from Windows ancestry,  it seems to be a specially tailored
and highly limited OS of its own designed to look like Windows although it
is not.   iPhone and Android are at least built on the unix or linux kernels
for which there are very lean and efficient versions out there  (eg running
in a few MB of memory) - such as the Carnegie-Mellon version kernel.   I
read on one recent linux firmware device that was able to boot into full
running in about 0.5 seconds by optimising various things - eg no compressed
boot image and special drivers.   I don't see much chance of Windows being
able to achieve that kind of performance although I would like to be proved
wrong.

3 - reliable internet connectivity means that many grunty services can be
off-loaded to heavy iron servers which could be Windows or Unix or Sun or
IBM or whatever - think of gmail, Google search, Google maps,  iTunes store,
You-Tube, Hotmail, Yahoo and all online services etc.   This is the strong
point of phones like the iPhone and Android which do just this, and not
through a phone company interface (read expensive) but direct to the
Internet (read cheap).    A phone with a reasonable OS that can do a RDC or
VNC connection to a server has all the advantages of the server while
portable.    It is in a sense a return to thin client (but portable).

Embarcadero here is a prediction and I suggest you consider these as a
direction:

(a) an easy to learn language (pascal is that) with a cross platform VCL
that is reasonably able to write applications (with various framework
flavours and considerations) for Windows, OSX, linux  but more importantly
into iPhone and Android would absolutely be the killer app like Turbo pascal
was.

The goal would be to produce a compiler/language that uses the respective OS
to render the standard controls - windows uses Comctl32.dll, Apple and Linux
etc must have their own, so there needs to be something that drives the OS
native graphics libraries and controls.  That is not relying on some added
party framework like wine that may lag behind the state of the art.   Much
better to tap into what the latest version of any OS is capable of
rendering. If VCLX on windows is inferior to VCL then either people won't
want to use it, or there would need to be some automated tool to port code
to VCLX (renaming component types etc) as a batch process to produce the
other OS flavours.

As far as I am concerned it would be fine for Embarcadero to say we will
only make VCLX portable within certain constraints, it may well be less than
the current VCL in some areas, but it does not have to be more than VCL, as
those who want easy portability may be happy to give up third party
components and win32 calls and live in well defined boundaries in order to
get code they can compile and run on various OS's.  If some win32 calls
could be given some equivalents it would be neat,  but this would be icing
on the cake.

(b) The other way to go would make a really easy way for a browser to run
any Delphi app, so it could be put on a web site.   Now others have pointed
out that can be done via browsers that can call up some RDP client or
terminal services client.  It is not easy yet however.  I don't know how one
could do that, but there must be something possible.   I would certainly be
paying close attention to whatever the Google OS is likely to do, as I would
imagine thats the sort of direction they would be thinking too, some way to
web enable any desktop applications via some RDC or VNC connections into a
browser or particularly the Chrome browser.

(c) make Delphi grunty to.  64 bit and 128 bit - why not go to 128 or 256
bit compilers in one jump? ok so the processors to run it are not there yet,
well one can only dream eh?  I would settle for int128 for now (extension to
int64).

Thinking beyond mobiles, the generation beyond them will be smaller not
bigger.   Maybe there will be display glasses that can be put on to get the
advantage of a huge screen display just like we have earphones these days
rather than speakers.  Maybe virtual keyboards - projected onto a wooden
desktop from a small projector. Likely it will have a fast broadband online
connection to ones home server where the data and programs actually are.

For Microsoft my prediction would be to bite the bullet, evaluate the
Windows kernel, and if it is inferior to the various linux and Unix ones out
there ditch it and put Win32 and ..Net and all the other API's over such a
kernel.   Its been spectacularly successful for Apple to do that with OSX,
and the Windows development environment is particularly good

John

I have also been through the same era and agree.  They should agressively
pursue the cross-platform verison but make a decent job of it this time.

Eric

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