Comment by microtonal
2 years ago
I loved Turbo Pascal, but to me the high point of Borland's tooling was Delphi (1995). I don't want to sound like old man yells at cloud, but every time someone says that building GUIs with Electron is so easy compared to native apps, I just wished they experienced Delphi in its prime.
There are some very short/simple demos on YouTube:
> but every time someone says that building GUIs with Electron is so easy compared to native apps, I just wished they experienced Delphi in its prime.
Every time someone says that, I mention Lazarus. I stll get a thrill out of using it (one of my github projects is a C library, and the GUI app is in Lazarus, which calls into the API to do everything).
The problem I find with Lazarus is that it seems to be slowly dying; yes, they still work on it, but feature-wise they are very behind what can be done with HTML+CSS and a handful of js utility functions.
A wealthy benefactor could very quickly get Lazarus to the point of doing all the eye-candy extras that HTML+CSS let you do (animated elements, for example).
Looks pretty similar to C# WinForms that ships with Visual Studio. https://youtu.be/n5WneLo6vOY?si=maped85dMX90KIn1
They can still experience it today with the community edition.
If you can agree to their very strange terms and conditions.
Or, use Lazarus/Free Pascal, which is almost identical, except for the documentation, which needs a massive overhaul, in tooling and content.
Not everyone is religious against such agreements.
Those can profit from very latest version.
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I will happily fill an hour with trash talking Microsoft, but getting the father of Delphi on board is one of the shrewdest things they’ve managed. I wish he’d found a different project to sink his teeth into though.