Delphi community edition, learn real coding

Update: I updated the text to better point out writing in past-tense at one point. I apologize for not catching the formulation quicker, but I have edited the text to better reflect this now.

With the release of the community edition of Delphi and C++ builder, Embarcadero is finally making Delphi accessible to anyone who wants to enjoy the rich flavour of object-pascal that Delphi represents. In my 30+ years of coding I have yet to find a language or development toolkit as creative as object pascal, with Delphi being the flagship compiler and toolkit. Java and C# might appeal to some, but for developers solving real problems out there, the stability of Delphi is hard to match (more about that later).

Besides, object-pascal is fun, highly creative and easy to learn! Just imagine the wealth of knowledge a language that has stood the test of time has to offer!

Finally a straight up license

The license Embarcadero has landed on is easy to understand and straight to the point: the community edition is free for open source projects, and you can use it for commercial products until your sales reach a certain sum – and then you are expected to buy it. I wish I had this back in the day, I bought my first Delphi with money from my student loan.

Unreal engine operates with a similar license

This license is incidentally the same used by market leading game and multimedia companies. Both Crytech (CryoEngine) and Epic Games (Unreal engine) operate with the same concept. Instead of charging you a sum up-front, you can create your product and pay when your earnings justify it. Unreal-engine has a fixed percentage if memory serves me correct. So the Embarcadero license is more than fair.

What the community edition of Delphi and C++ builder means in practical terms, is that you get to learn, build and bring your idea to market without that initial investment. When you boat floats and you make money, then you pay for the toolbox that helped you be successful.

If you are a startup company with investors and limited funds, you get to adjust your license fee to your runway after the fact rather than before. So if your product tanks and you never make the expected sum; well that’s one bill less to worry about.

The myth of free Microsoft products

One of the things I often hear when talking to developers, is the “visual studio myth”. The notion that Visual Studio is free and there are no strings attached. And this is a myth, just to be clear. Microsoft have ridicules amounts of money so they could afford to lend you Visual Studio for five years (which was how they operated until very recently). If you checked the license for Visual Studio that’s what it said: you get to use it for five years, then you better pony up the cash. And by that time you have no doubt advanced to Enterprise level, which means that check will be signed in blood.

So this illusion that Visual Studio is free, is just that. Young developers are just as likely to use a pirated copy as violating a community agreement – so even today with the subscription model and ordinary trial they don’t notice the devil lurking in the details.

But for entrepreneurs that are starting from scratch, that need to set up a budget for their product that a board or single investor can trust, well it’s hard work because development is never an exact science. The coding part is, but it’s the human factor that is challenged, not the technology. It’s the spirit and individuals ability to see solutions where others see only walls that is tested; especially when you are making something truly unique. Something that doesn’t exist yet.

And once you are in that basket and have your entire product, perhaps even your career, riding on the investors being happy (which are rarely developers I might add) – the temptation of going “all in” is very real and very tangible. Let’s use MSSQL since we already have a VS license. Let’s use IIS instead and get rid of Apache. Lets use Sharepoint since we get a nice discount. Complete dependency doesn’t take long.

Now it’s no secret that my brief affair with C# makes me biased, and I am biased. Proudly biased. Bias on tap even. This is an object pascal blog where all things object pascal is loved and valued. So read my articles while imagining me with a cheeky smile in the corner of my mouth, and a slight sparkle in my eyes.

But in all fairness, the new Delphi community license is up-front, no hidden fees, honest and direct. If it wasnt.. well, I have a history of shooting myself in both feet by being painfully honest. I cant find anything wrong with the license and believe me I have tried. This is christmas and my birthday all rolled into one! Embarcadero has put their ears to the ground and listened to their customers.

With this in place Embarcadero is cementing a foundation of growth for our community, the languages they deliver and our future.

Rock solid

Delphi has always been known for producing rock solid, reliable database solutions. Delphi is awesome because it covers the whole spectrum of coding, from low level procedural dll files to system services, industrial scale servers, desktop and mobile applications – the list goes on. There are 3 million active Delphi developers around the world. Not to mention the millions more relying on older versions of Delphi or alternative compilers to power their businesses.

Visually bind database fields to containers, its details like this that saves time

If you mentally jump into a time machine and travel back to the 1980s, then slowly walk along the timeline and look at the changes in computing. Look at all the challenges before Delphi and how in 1995 Delphi took the world by storm. Into Delphi, Anders Hejlsberg and his team invested all their knowledge and everything they had learned from previous compilers and run-time libraries. This investment never stopped. There have been many architects involved over the years, each adding their contribution.

The amount of skill, insight, technique and dedication is breathtaking.

C# might be the cool kid on the block right now, but it’s painfully unsuitable for a wide range of tasks. Tasks that require a programming language with more depth. There is also something to be said about the test of time. Delphi and C++ builder have decades of evolution behind them. Many of the core principles were inherited from Turbo Pascal which dominated the 1980s and early 1990s.

And let me back that up with an example:

I used to do some work for a Norwegian company that delivers POS terminals to most of northern europe. When I got there they had a C# department and a Delphi department. Obviously I thought they wanted me to work on the Delphi codebase, but to my surprise they threw me into C#.

While I was there I noticed that Delphi was used on the hardware, the actual terminals themselves and the data transmissions. POS terminals is a potentially fragile but important instrument for any store; it has to operate 24/7 and a single mistake can be a financial disaster. I doubt more needs to be said here.

A POS terminal consists of many parts, here showing the card reader. Instability in the terminal can lead to loss of data, corrupted backups and network problems

The irony in all this was – that two years earlier they had tried to replace Delphi on the terminals with C#. They invested millions into rewriting the whole thing from scratch. But the rollout of this monstrosity was a total fiasco.

The bro-grammer’s forgot that some things are there for a reason. They neglected the subtle nuances of how each language works and how code behaves under extreme conditions; conditions where ram, storage space and cpu power are severely limited. On cheap, low-powered embedded boards even the slightest fluctuation in CPU activity can tank the whole system.

C# and Java were unfit because the GC (garbage collector) would kick in on random intervals to clean up the heap, this caused CPU spikes. The spikes were enough to freeze the terminal for a brief second, disturbing network activity, disk operations and database stability. It was the first time since the early 90s that I actually saw “Disk C: has a read-write error” dialog. I had to bite my lip to not laugh out loud. I tried so hard, honestly.

The glorified update was haunted by broken transmissions, un-responsive UIs and ruined backups (the device backs up its receipt database both locally and remotely many times a day). After a couple of weeks they rolled back the whole thing. Customers demanded their old system back. The system written in Delphi (and if you think the C# “native image compiler” from Microsoft made things better, think again).

So Delphi and object pascal still powers a large amount of financial transactions in northern europe. You will find Delphi used by the government, security companies, oil companies, POS brokers, ATM’s, missile guidance systems – anywhere where a high level of reliability is essential.

Getting started

Jumping into a new programming language or learning your first one can be daunting. Thankfully Delphi has been around almost as long as C/C++ (3 years younger) so there is plenty of knowledge online, most of it free (always google something before asking on forums, make that a habit).

Study the classics that teaches you how and things work

But to really save you time I urge you to buy a couple of books on Delphi. Now before you run off to Amazon or google around, there are two types of books you want.

You want a book that teaches you Delphi in general, a modern book that shows you OOP, generics and all the features that were added to Delphi after the XE version naming. So make sure you buy a book that teaches you Delphi from (at the very least) XE6 and upwards. Delphi “Berlin” or “Tokyo” is perfect.

The next book has to do with technique. What makes Delphi so incredibly powerful is this awesome depth. You can write libraries in hand optimized assembly code if you want – or you can write object-oriented, generics driven high-level mobile apps. Between those two extremes is a wealth of topics, including system services, your own servers, every database engine known to mankind and much, much more.

But you want a good book that teaches you techniques, techniques that underpin all the cool high-level features people take for granted. The most cherished book you will ever own for Delphi, is The tomes of Delphi: Algorithms and data structures (catchy title, but this is a book you can come back to over many years).

Now go download that thing and enjoy! Welcome to the coolest language in the world!

Happy coding!