Re: Borland Selling Delphi?

> > So now is the time to developers look to Lazarus project and FreePascal?
> >    
> >   Lazarus + JVCL would be great !!!
> Why? Delphi _could_ become a good tool again. Maybe we should be glad that
> Borland sells it, because they seem not to have cared a lot anymore after
> the really big boom in the nineties?!

Sure, but fact is that FPC team _is_ working on new native functionality,
and Borland is mostly focussing on .NET.

For native code (and I don't do anything else in Object Pascal), in the long run, I'd put my
cards on FPC, but of course I'm biassed :-)

> Delphi 5 was the last really usable version. Everything after it had no big
> improvements worth an upgrade. Let alone the versions that were unusable
> unto their first update pack.

And way more expensive. However 6 and 7 _ARE_ fairly stable after the
fixpacks, I work with them daily now for several years. And while I have played
with D2005/D2006, I haven't had extensive day-in-day-out experience with
them.

I know about two annoying bugs in both D6 and D7:
(1) some instability in the form pascal code or highlighter parser. Sometimes
merely opening a unit totally crashes delphi, and after a while the problems
go away (probably because the problematic construct was removed again). I
have never been able to isolate it, but that is also because it is
relatively rare.
(2) Sometimes if you press ctrl-F2 quickly after you start the program, the
program is killed, but the debugger still thinks it is running. Having a
system under load or a heavy virusscanner seem to make this worse. Also D7
seems to have more trouble than D6 in this respect.
 
> So I just see selling the IDEs as a positive step because Borland apparently
> did not care much for them anyways - release cycles being more important
> than quality.

I see positives steps when I see actual positive movement. D2006 was
actually somewhat positive in the fact that at least they spent some time on
the native port. Intentions and PR are cheap, the only thing that matters
(and is somewhat objectively measurable)is what you can verify that has been
done.
 


 
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