Thats it, I officially hate Delphi

[Cogman]

Delphi is such a putrid language, it is retardly slow, recent software for it looks like it was developed in the 90's (No joke, the 2006 version of it looks a heck of a lot like VB6 did). And the things it does to make things "Easy" ultimately just get in the way. And dang it, I miss my templates!

How bad is it? Bad, I had a simple problem of having to split text up by a given charactor. An easy task, right? So being the OO savey programmer that I am, I said "Hey, lets use the TStringList object, it'll work just like a vector or a queue!". I quickly found out that that is definitely not the case.

And don't get me started on the need to write begin, and end and then. It is retarded to be so explicit with simple scoping syntax.

I have no idea what memory Allocation scheme they employed, but it obviously was a terrible choice. By using the Tstringlist, opening my simple 1mb file quickly consumed 100's of MB in memory! Even after playing with TStringList members to the point where the data fit in a reasonable ram allocation, The retarded thing was taking forever, much longer then any sane program should take to execute.

So what was my solution? I created a C++ dll, and told delphi to interface with it. With C++, and almost identical code with strings and vectors, I saw an order of magnitude increase in speed and decrease in memory usage. (And that was even AFTER having to take the data from the string and put it into a char** for inter language operability).

The language is defunct, and borland or codegear, or embardico, (The company has traded hands MANY times), have no clue on what makes a good language.

So why am I using this god forsaken language? Because the boss is 60, been programming for 40 years, and he loves it. He has never been officially taught how to program (And it really shows in his code, Imagine giant blocks of code with repeated statements that scream "Make me a function").

He's a great guy, but man, I really hate having to work with his language of choice. I would really love to move away from the borland software suite and on to something like MSVS.

 

[SunnyD]

It's true they haven't really updated their libraries recently, though there's nothing stopping you from using the latest Win32 common controls in your app. Fundamentally though, Delphi is Pascal with objects, so inherently it has all the power and flexibility that C and C++ have. You just need to get used to it. I had no knowledge of Delphi when I started my last job, and quickly took over through attrition on the primary product in Delphi. I don't consider myself an expert, but it didn't take me long to figure my way around it.

For me, Delphi is VB with a little bit of C thrown in. It's great for rapid visual development, but it's general purpose enough to do just about anything. My main gripe would be the runtimes, which is why it feels slow. Thankfully, I don't have to use it anymore, as I've traded up jobs for a better company.

 

[SearchMaster]

Heh - I used to love Delphi in the early 90s. VB was a POS then, and VC++ wasn't much better. I haven't used it since then and it probably hasn't evolved much either.

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: SunnyD
It's true they haven't really updated their libraries recently, though there's nothing stopping you from using the latest Win32 common controls in your app. Fundamentally though, Delphi is Pascal with objects, so inherently it has all the power and flexibility that C and C++ have. You just need to get used to it. I had no knowledge of Delphi when I started my last job, and quickly took over through attrition on the primary product in Delphi. I don't consider myself an expert, but it didn't take me long to figure my way around it.

For me, Delphi is VB with a little bit of C thrown in. It's great for rapid visual development, but it's general purpose enough to do just about anything. My main gripe would be the runtimes, which is why it feels slow. Thankfully, I don't have to use it anymore, as I've traded up jobs for a better company.

Well, that's the thing, even if delphi can't do everything that C or C++ can, and even if it could, their compiler for it sucks hard (I doubt that its been updated much from its first incarnation in the 90's).

Don't believe me, try making a for loop that step up by 10, or by 2, or that double each step. Try making a template of any form, or a stack, queue, or BTree that can work for more then one data type. You just can't do it. (expecially the template stuff, You could do a loop that steps up by x amount, but it requires more code then C does, might be the same in speed, but requires more code none the less).

However, my biggest complaint is with the general slowness of the strings library and most of the OO classes that they've created. Give me a C++ vector, a strings class, and maybe even a stringstream, and I'll write code that runs circles around delphi in exactly the same amount of code, or less.

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: SearchMaster
Heh - I used to love Delphi in the early 90s. VB was a POS then, and VC++ wasn't much better. I haven't used it since then and it probably hasn't evolved much either.

Having used vb6 in the late 90's I can guarantee you, that no, It has not evolved at all. the 2006 version is about par with my vb6 experience.

 

[BoberFett]

I didn't know anyone still used Delphi. I bought a copy of it at 1.0 because it was suppose to supplant VB for RAD and never really did much with it. I messed around with it but VB was already dominant and had massive 3rd party support.

 

[Markbnj]

I did one of the very early reviews of Delphi for Dr. Dobb's Journal. At the time it was pretty impressive, and was seen as an outgrowth of Borland's early work with IDE's, frameworks, and Turbo Pascal (which I had been a user of for a couple of years). I know it still has a pretty significant user base, but it has been hampered by the decline of 4GL environments in favor of a few primary languages and increasingly complete frameworks for them that can do almost anything. It's also been held back by Borland's troubles, mostly Microsoft's rape and pillage of their compiler teams in the late 90's as the company's fortunes waned. And probably you could say its been restrained by having Pascal in its genes. I see it as an historical milestone, but not very relevant today.

 

[JasonCoder]

Blame the Microsoft limousines that rolled up to Borland's offices filled with bags of cash. Anders is currently a distinguished engineer at MS.

 

[SunnyD]

Oh don't get me wrong - I feel your pain. I learned some interesting... errr... limitations to for loops in delphi (The fact that they're pre-evaluated is a pain-in-the-ass!).