Delphi is gone

前两天从猪圈的奥克熊那里，得知Delphi又出了新版了（Delphi XE），才发现自己已经很久没有关注过Delphi相关的信息了。今天，欧罗的帖子提到Delphi Distiller的作者不愿意出for XE的版本，特地去看了下，distiller的作者说(http://www.liteapplications.com/)：

The guys at Embarcadero announced a few days ago that the next Delphi will be called Delphi XE and will be released in September. It will be a very minor update, nothing really new. There isn’t anything cross-platform or 64 bit here. More details at the RAD Studio XE website.

As everyone could expect, their attempt at Delphi cross-platformness is buggy as hell and they will need one more year to get it working. Very understandable. However, instead of releasing a preview (or not releasing anything), they are launching a rebranded Delphi from last year with a couple plugins, for the price of a major upgrade. It’s a good thing that most people know when to skip a version.

Still, some enthusiasts will want to install it as soon as a crack is available. The problem is that, as many of you will have noticed, the newest Embarcadero products are getting harder to crack, and at the same time there is a lack of interest by the programming community in anything new from Embarcadero. As a result, you may not see a crack until weeks after the official release. Scene release groups won’t even bother making new cracks after every update. There is a general feeling that Delphi is a thing of the past, and I agree.

I see very little point in upgrading to new Delphi versions nowadays. Delphi was already a mature product at the end of the nineties, and as much as they try, there is no way to make it much more productive than say, Delphi 7, without breaking compatibility. Besides, we aren’t in the nineties any more. We live in a world where open source is taking over (see Android). Basing new projects on a proprietary tool like Delphi from a small company like Embarcadero which struggles to stay afloat sounds crazy. I have advocated Delphi for years but honestly, I can’t recommend it any more.

So is there anything better than Delphi? We all know the options, but in my opinion only one beats Delphi in every aspect (except in compilation speed): Qt with C++. It is vastly more complete than the VCL or even .NET, it is free, cross-platform, open source, usable on commercial projects, 32 and 64 bit, works with the world’s best IDE (Visual Studio), the documentation is top quality, etc.

For these reasons, I would like to announce here that there won’t be a next version of Delphi Distiller. Maybe it’s time for a Qt Distiller

易博龙是一家小公司，应该是没有足够的财力（更重要的是某种诱惑力）来留住顶尖的人才，在微软的VS高压之下，继续发展Delphi。况且，如今已经不再是售卖IDE的年代了，在免费开源的各种IDE（如Eclipse）和几乎免费又有口皆碑的VisualStudio重围中，也很难想象易博龙能依靠什么，来让Delphi冲出重围？个人认为，如果可能的话，将Delphi开源，让社区来维护继续发展，倒是有新生的可能性。至少凭借着往日的光环，和一个目前仍然存在的社区（情结），自成一派应该没什么问题。不过，这目前来看也是不可能的，就从Delphi在易博龙手中，反破解手段越来越强势可以看出。相对于产品反破解越来越强的，是社区对产品的兴趣度越来越低，这，注定是末路。其实，自从Borland决定出售Delphi（以及整个开发工具产品线）的那刻起，就已宣告了Delphi的末日。

对于喜欢优雅的Pascal/Object Pascal语言的程序员，其实，早已经有一个更有活力的免费开源产品作为替代了——Lazarus。基于跨平台的Free Pascal编译器，Lazarus本身也同时跨多个平台，包括Delphi还在road map中的Mac OS X，Win x64等平台的支持。

我自己，直到今年4月，仍然是使用的是2003年作为Borland产品专家，被Borland所赠与的Delphi 6.0版，不同于distiller作者所说，我觉得Delphi 6.0已经是一个非常稳定的版本了 。而从4月份开始，我就几乎再也没有打开过Delphi了。最常用的IDE，变成了Eclipse，语言，则变成了Python。由于项目原因，今后基本上也会更多的使用Python了。至于Lazarus/Free Pascal，去年做lazskin的时候，着实研究了一把，我看好它的未来，今后如果需要使用编译型语言的时候，我会首选Free Pascal的。

如distiller作者所言，我们已经不再处于90年代了，Delphi应该属于不再回来的过去了。

不出意外的话，这篇文章，也将是“钟爱Delphi”分类目录中，最后一篇文章了。

Because Delphi is gone…