Our main product is in Delphi. We got 20+ year old code and brand new code in production. Several hundred forms/windows, ~1MLOC. We're serving a few hundred businesses in a niche (~75% market share).
However we're working on migrating to .Net, though the full transition will take many years. Main limitation is that UI design and such is just nowhere near what we got in Delphi. We're quite used to being able to whip up a non-trivial UI in a day.
So for now we're just moving the "backend" stuff to .Net, doing RPC to our .Net service and similar.
Same here. More than ten years I've moved to Java as replacement since it was the best next thing. It has a practical WYSIWYG GUI editor but still nowhere the fantastic quality of Delphi and just dead nowadays too.
A GUI written in Delphi would function natively in any Windows and then run any Mac or Linux through Wine without troubles.
Just wondering aloud - wouldn't it be easier to port the .dfm parsing to your desired language of choice and keep designing forms in Delphi?
I can only imagine that it's not just the ease of design part (and legacy code) that keeps you in Delphi, it's the whole aspect of it being integrated with writing code, components, units and fast compilation.
We rely quite heavily on DevExpress components, but yeah dfm parsing is something I've considered. But I have this gut feeling while it might get you 80% there you'll spend a ton of time fixing the last 20%, negating the win.
Enough people in Germany are, to keep one conference going (EKON), having tracks on a Windows/.NET conference (BASTA!), and articles on developer magazines.
Delphi is one of the best options for rapid UI development, especially if you care more about functionality than looks. From what I gather that makes it somewhat poplar for industrial use cases.
I did a little bit of Delphi 10ish or so years ago. This was a legacy application. It actually wasn't too bad. I assume it is mostly people working on legacy stuff at this point. Rewriting a huge code base which deals with thousands of edge cases is probably simply not worth it and sticking with Delphi is simply easier then.
Quite a lot of software in the industry. I maintain a large scientific application for a big oil & gas company.
15 years ago, Delphi was one of the only system to both allow very fast GUI application creation and had some very nice flowsheeting components. For process engineering, this was really really nice.
>Is there anybody still using Delphi? -- I have a friend which only develops in Delphi, but I love to tell her that joke.
Is there any serious business who believes that only customers in America are still relevant? -- I have friends who are HN posters who believe that, but I love to tell them that joke! :-) <g> :-)
Yes, and it has never been a bad experience. However, I don't see a use case for new projects. There are many language options nowadays and most have a larger developer pool.
I don't think the Community Edition will have the same impact as for instance Visual Studio CE.
This. It’s a great little system for such use cases. It is mainly falling out of favor for new development because it’s hard to find devs. But in terms of quickly getting automation equipment designed and running it’s a workhorse.
