C++Builder 11 Community Edition
96 points by DaOne256 1 year ago | 71 comments- marcodiego 1 year agoMy main problem with delphi: it is "too proprietary". It was a very productive IDE in the 90's or early 2000's but lost their path and never recovered.
Some new versions broke compatibility with previous version's components. There was the case where you paid a good amount of money on some proprietary components and they simply wouldn't work in the next version: you were imprisoned in an obsolete IDE. By not being multi-platform (I heard it improved lately) you could only use it with/for win32 so it lost servers, embedded, cloud and mobile. By not being open-source nobody could improve it.
Then it had to compete with "native tools". Whoever develops for windows wouldn't quit ms' tools to use it, whoever develops for mac wouldn't quit apple's tools to use it, whoever develops for android wouldn't quit google's tools to use it, whoever develops for linux was mostly ignored after kylix.
Note that I didn't even mentioned price and license.
They improved it later, I heard. But seems more like the old case of too little too late. Most successful programming languages today are open source and multi-platform. Delphi was dependent on win32 for too long and it still is "too proprietary". You do the world a favor by porting your project to lazarus.
- georgehaake 1 year agoDelphi 7, that was a lovely vintage...
- codewritinfool 1 year agoDelphi 7 was / is fantastic. Soon after that, they went .NET and the wheels came off.
- codewritinfool 1 year ago
- msh 1 year agoI think it was C# with winforms that broke the last oppotunity delphi had.
- notpushkin 1 year agoDoesn't Lazarus address at least some of these concerns? (I don't think it's a drop in replacement though.)
- deaddodo 1 year agoMostly, although Lazarus has an incompatible ABI (LCLs vs VCLs). So legacy projects relient on third-party components don't benefit from it.
- deaddodo 1 year ago
- anta40 1 year agoI don't mind trying Delphi again since they support mobile targets (Android & iOS). Too bad the IDE itself only runs on Windows...
- 1 year ago
- georgehaake 1 year ago
- blinkingled 1 year agoBorland's C++ compiler was _fast_. And I mean eye wateringly fast on crappy pre-AMD64 hardware. I wonder if it supports modern C++ today and is still faster than other compilers. (If I am not mistaken this new edition is a offshoot of that?)
(Yeah I am not downloading the "Community" edition if I have to provide my name address and phone number. Really if your product needs mindshare and you offer community edition the least you can do is make it easily downloadable.)
- ndiddy 1 year agoI've downloaded one of their past community editions, their sales team will call and email you. They back off when you tell them you're not evaluating the product for your work, but it's still kind of annoying.
- notreallymy 1 year agoNot only that. He knew the project name I created!
- kwanbix 1 year agoSo you give them your real email, and not a for-all-the-registration-crap email? And you also give them your real phone number?
- blinkingled 1 year agoYeah I figured as much
- notreallymy 1 year ago
- yazzku 1 year agoThis kind of email+phone registration was common in the 90s and earlier. Oh, wait, it's 2023.
- rob74 1 year agoFast for a C++ compiler... but still worlds away from the Delphi compiler!
- qwerty456127 1 year agoIt took Microsoft some generations to stoppe requiring you to sign-in to use community edition after the trial period ends. Perhaps Borland will fix this in some years as well.
- CamperBob2 1 year agoFar as I can tell, it still does. Nothing more annoying when chasing a bug than being forced to look up a password I haven't used for several months in order to use the debugger.
- qwerty456127 1 year agoVisual Studio 2022 Community Edition apparently doesn't stop working even as you keep abstaining from signing in. It still asks you to every now and then but you don't really have to agree anymore. You had to reset the trial period (this is easy, it's there on StackOverflow and GitHub) every month with previous versions but with 2022 you don't.
- qwerty456127 1 year ago
- CamperBob2 1 year ago
- zorgmonkey 1 year agoI've never used it, but if memory serves they are, like many other companies, using a fork clang. So I expect it will be about as fast if not slower then clang.
- kwanbix 1 year agoYou don't have an email for spam? And put any phone number.
- blinkingled 1 year agoI keep forgetting my spam email address/passwords lol I have a Google voice number for when I need to use it on forms but I have seen some websites don't accept it - there's ways to determine that it's VOIP it seems.
- 1 year ago
- blinkingled 1 year ago
- pjmlp 1 year agoC++17, using their clang fork.
- ndiddy 1 year ago
- pjmlp 1 year agoThe only VB like development experience for C++.
Microsoft completely messed up the XAML / C++/CX development experience with internal politics, only to have the team responsible for C++/WinRT going on to have fun in Rust/WinRT, leaving the former in maintenance state.
- sirwhinesalot 1 year agoI can definitely understand them wanting to drop custom C++ extensions, but it's a shame they can't figure out how to provide a nice development experience for their newer UI platforms. If only .NET actually works reasonably well with it (and there's a huge managed<->native overhead) maybe it should have just been WPF 2.0?
Not that I would use WinUI anyway, microsoft cannot be trusted with UI frameworks anymore.
- pjmlp 1 year agoThe custom C++ extensions argument is a very bad lame excuse, it isn't as if WinRT was ever going to be cross platform, or not every single C and C++ compiler used in production (not toy compilers) doesn't have their own set of extensions anyway.
I also don't consider anything related to WinUI/UWP trustworthy for production development, and I used to advocate for it.
Stuff like how .NET Native, C++/CX => C++/WinRT transition, UWP => WinUI were managed, is how they lost most of us that really liked WinRT.
- rbanffy 1 year agoI really, really, am baffled at how difficult it seems to have a GUI builder tool that outputs a description of the UI that a program can just load (or a compiler transform into a structure inside the program) as objects the program can use, handling events and pushing presentation information into it.
That was pretty much what VB did, with immense success.
- sirwhinesalot 1 year agoAll of that is fair, it's not like C++/CX was all that different from needing to use Obj-C on macOS. I'm just saying I can accept their reasoning. Using only standard C++ is better in a vacuum, but only if nothing is lost in the transition.
May I ask what your plan is regarding UI at this moment? I've given up and gone the web route (with Avalonia on my pocket in case my sanity gets dangerously low).
- jahnu 1 year agoSame. The previous company I worked for we went all in on UWP for our Windows SDK.
An almost complete waste of time as Microsoft failed to deliver on their promises.
- ok123456 1 year agoJust use MFC 4.2 imho.
- rbanffy 1 year ago
- pjmlp 1 year ago
- germandiago 1 year agoHow good is C++ Builder? Ever tried? I Saw It a couple of years ago and it looked good actually but noone seems to use it.
- georgehaake 1 year agoHistorically a great tool along with Delphi, with poor subsequent management/ownership since the very early 2000's.
- deaddodo 1 year agoImagine classic Visual C++ with it's form builder (versus the modern WinRT stuff) and hooks...it's much like that. I would say the experience is a little smoother. I do remember the version I used to use had issues with the form builder to where getting exactly what you wanted was finicky (the rendered/preview version was never quite what the compiled version ended up as).
- pjmlp 1 year agoIf only VC++ ever had a form builder for C++ like C++ Builder has been doing for 30 years.
- pjmlp 1 year ago
- pjmlp 1 year agoLike I described, is like using VB for the GUI stuff, coupled with the C++ capabilities.
Additionally it has a symbiotic relationship with Delphi, similarly to how C# and C++/CLI are integrated, only much better.
Nowadays the compiler backend is based in clang.
- georgehaake 1 year ago
- gavinray 1 year ago> Come in thread
> Ctrl+F "pjmlp"
I was not disappointed.
- sirwhinesalot 1 year ago
- cfn 1 year agoYou can only use this edition if you make less than 5000 USD and/or have less than 5 devs. If you do, licenses start at 1000 USD per year. Assuming a commercial app, of course.
- keepamovin 1 year agoHow does this compare to developing in Obj-C or Swift for iOS? Is this like a cross-platform thing?
- keepamovin 1 year ago
- aetherspawn 1 year agoDoes this support macOS for apps? The website is a little unclear and “Windows and iOS” is a really odd combination of platform support.
Aside, I have used this in the past for GUI on windows and it was amazing. Like .NET but native and better.
- DaOne256 1 year ago
- nurettin 1 year agoThe "community edition" version of delphi had no visual editor, no way to build a bpl and it was 32bit only. I don't know thos c++11 compiler's features, it isn't immediately apparent in the mobile site.
- matt3210 1 year agoWhy this instead of clion?
- pjmlp 1 year agoVB like development experience for C++.
- pjmlp 1 year ago
- coliveira 1 year agoThe main problem with Borland C++ is that it is still a 32bit compiler.
- peterhull90 1 year agoBorland C++ is a 32-bit compiler, I believe the latest version is 5.5 and it came out in about 2000.
There is a newer version from Embarcadero, 7.20 from 2016[1].
The compiler in C++Builder is more modern and it will target 64-bit for Windows at least.[0]
[0]: https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Alexandria/en/C%2B...
- kwanbix 1 year ago"C++Builder includes compilers for Win32, Win64 and iOS"
- pjmlp 1 year agoWhich is why there is a new clang based compiler now.
- deaddodo 1 year agoThey say right on the release announcement that they have a clang-based compiler and that the system supports 64-bit binaries.
- Narishma 1 year agoThis is C++ Builder, not Borland C++.
- peterhull90 1 year ago
- phendrenad2 1 year agoI understand why there isn't a Mac version, but it's still a bit disappointing.
- sproketboy 1 year ago[dead]
- set_of_integer 1 year ago[flagged]