Is Delphi Dead? No.
A few months ago Alex Miller pointed me to this Delphi doom article (the site appears to be down at the moment), which reminded me to post about the same topic. Here goes.
Delphi shipped in 1995, and its demise has been declared frequently since 1997 or so. In a sense this demise is true, yet also false. Delphi’s current popularity is very different in form (not only in magnitude) from that of Java, C#, etc. Delphi is used substantially by commercial software vendors, and only rarely by enterprises. An ugly reality of the software industry is that the bulk of software developers nationwide work inside large non-software companies, so this usage pattern most likely does not produce the level of unit sales that Codegear (Borland’s dev-tools subsidiary) would like to see. It does, however, produce an enormous number of Delphi application instances running “in the field”, used by real paying end users, who don’t care (or know) what development tools were used to build the software they buy. Many commercial software products, both those in shrinkwrap at retail stores and those for vertical markets, are written in Delphi and will continue to be, because there are very few other good choices for high quality (polished) native Win32 GUI software. In these markets, shipping a Java or .NET app can be a competitive disadvantage (though to a lesser extent over time), and old-style VB is a sad joke.
I don’t think Delphi is eligible for demise until the dominant desktop operating system ships with a dominant runtime platform “in the box”. For example, if all of this happens at the same time:
- Microsoft ships Windows with the .NET runtime already installed
- That version Windows is the commonly deployed version
- That version of the .NET runtime is the commonly targeted version
At that time, the .NET platform (with the language of your choice) could be a compelling replacement for Delphi in its niche. There is a lot to like about .NET (and Java, and I use them both), but I’m not holding my breath for the above conjunction.
Over at Oasis Digital we have several ongoing Delphi projects in which we develop and extend in-house, enterprise applications. These projects feel notably lonely (very few developers here in the midwest use Delphi), and the Delphi language leaves a lot to be desired (such as garbage collection) - but the resulting software works very well for our customers, especially when we add in a bit of Lua or Prolog (story coming someday…).
Delphi is not dead. It’s not at the top of the popularity charts, and won’t be. It probably shouldn’t be your first choice for a new in-house enterprise application starting today, because of the network effects of Java and .NET popularity. But Delphi is not going away anytime soon, and is a great choice for certain classes of projects.
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January 15th, 2008 at 5:48 am
Prolog?! Sure, *now* you add the interesting stuff…
February 23rd, 2008 at 9:19 pm
What exactly is an “enterprise application”?
Something that isn’t shareware?
p.s. Sawzall and Python are not the most popular programming languages of all time and are used by the most popular company of all time: google. I think google is an enterprise. Therefore, popularity of a language isn’t always important in huge enterprises, such as google. Since google is an enterprise… and they use Python and Sawzall.. what makes you think Enterprises can’t use Delphi and freepascal if they need to use it? I am using freepascal and delphi for all my “enterprises” I consult with, for web apps and desktop software.
February 24th, 2008 at 8:59 am
At some future time I’ll write more about what I mean by “enterprise”; a short version is that this is software used by large or very large companies, generally companies not in the software business, for mostly internal use. Generally this means companies that bear very little resemblance to Google, though there is no doubt some enterprisey software used inside Google.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Delphi will not die., it will simply evolve. You can already use your existing code on Linux based OS.
Don’t forget Delphi4PHP
May 13th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
I worked with Delphi for years. For the price I paid for the product I did not expect it to be full of bugs. On top of this the support was pitiful. The people at Borland seemed to be snobs. Every patch needed the original disks which had to be retrieved from storage. They could have done well seeing that many of us did not want to go to .NET. However, they took another course and many of us are forgetting about Delphi and are moving to .NET.