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I wouldn't say that the IDE is shit, but it certainly isn't as good as VS, what issues do you encounter to make you say that?



- C++Builder: Compiler ICEs regularly

- Both: No undo in the UI builder

- Delphi: There are about 3 different ways of adding an existing file to a project. They seem to differ in how they track dependencies.

- Both: Project files periodically get corrupted.

- Both: Renaming a control on a form by only changing case causes some references to the control not to be updated.

- Both: No customizable keybindings

- C++Builder (might be true with Delphi too): The debugger periodically crashes.

- C++Builder: Sometimes the project fails to build and gives a bunch of errors in system headers. The solution? Close the IDE and open it again.

Those are just the big ones. There are a million tiny annoyances that add up to be very frustrating.


I stopped developing in Delphi in 2007, and even by then the IDE was starting to drift. The Delphi 5/6 IDE was great - much like Lazarus. The Delphi 7... well, I think it was okay, but I didn't really ever use it. Everything after that, started to make me face palm.

I did like Kylix. I messed about with it and I remember going to watch the UK demo of it by Charlie Calvert in the Polish Centre in London circa 2001/2002. I had a licensed version of 1.0 (and used the Betas as my company at the time was sub contracted by Borland UK, so we got perks like being NDA'd.) That they got the IDE to work was cool. But CLX really messed up the direction.

By the time they did the .Net version, the writing was on the wall.... that bug in the compiler that tied the compiler down in a way that made the 2.0 framework unhappy to run 1.1 binaries, that really told me all I wanted to know. I transitioned to .Net and C#.




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