from Hacker News

C++Builder 11 Community Edition

by DaOne256 on 9/15/23, 9:34 AM with 71 comments

  • by marcodiego on 9/15/23, 1:25 PM

    My main problem with delphi: it is "too proprietary". It was a very productive IDE in the 90's or early 2000's but lost their path and never recovered.

    Some new versions broke compatibility with previous version's components. There was the case where you paid a good amount of money on some proprietary components and they simply wouldn't work in the next version: you were imprisoned in an obsolete IDE. By not being multi-platform (I heard it improved lately) you could only use it with/for win32 so it lost servers, embedded, cloud and mobile. By not being open-source nobody could improve it.

    Then it had to compete with "native tools". Whoever develops for windows wouldn't quit ms' tools to use it, whoever develops for mac wouldn't quit apple's tools to use it, whoever develops for android wouldn't quit google's tools to use it, whoever develops for linux was mostly ignored after kylix.

    Note that I didn't even mentioned price and license.

    They improved it later, I heard. But seems more like the old case of too little too late. Most successful programming languages today are open source and multi-platform. Delphi was dependent on win32 for too long and it still is "too proprietary". You do the world a favor by porting your project to lazarus.

  • by blinkingled on 9/15/23, 12:27 PM

    Borland's C++ compiler was _fast_. And I mean eye wateringly fast on crappy pre-AMD64 hardware. I wonder if it supports modern C++ today and is still faster than other compilers. (If I am not mistaken this new edition is a offshoot of that?)

    (Yeah I am not downloading the "Community" edition if I have to provide my name address and phone number. Really if your product needs mindshare and you offer community edition the least you can do is make it easily downloadable.)

  • by pjmlp on 9/15/23, 9:59 AM

    The only VB like development experience for C++.

    Microsoft completely messed up the XAML / C++/CX development experience with internal politics, only to have the team responsible for C++/WinRT going on to have fun in Rust/WinRT, leaving the former in maintenance state.

  • by cfn on 9/15/23, 12:27 PM

    You can only use this edition if you make less than 5000 USD and/or have less than 5 devs. If you do, licenses start at 1000 USD per year. Assuming a commercial app, of course.

  • by aetherspawn on 9/16/23, 1:11 AM

    Does this support macOS for apps? The website is a little unclear and “Windows and iOS” is a really odd combination of platform support.

    Aside, I have used this in the past for GUI on windows and it was amazing. Like .NET but native and better.

  • by DaOne256 on 9/15/23, 9:35 AM

  • by nurettin on 9/15/23, 5:00 PM

    The "community edition" version of delphi had no visual editor, no way to build a bpl and it was 32bit only. I don't know thos c++11 compiler's features, it isn't immediately apparent in the mobile site.

  • by matt3210 on 9/15/23, 3:58 PM

    Why this instead of clion?

  • by coliveira on 9/15/23, 12:38 PM

    The main problem with Borland C++ is that it is still a 32bit compiler.

  • by phendrenad2 on 9/15/23, 4:18 PM

    I understand why there isn't a Mac version, but it's still a bit disappointing.