Is Delphi Back?
The last few years for Delphi have not been good to say it nicely. Lately I have been looking at the latest plans for Delphi and finally they are moving in the right direction. Is it too little too late, or is there a chance for Delphi to recover as some say?
Is the Past the Past?
To summarize the problems that Delphi has had simply cannot be explained succinctly. From Kahn, to Inprise, to the re-Borland. It seems Delphi may be the cat of programming languages with its proverbial nine lives. If that is the case, how many does it have left?
Roadmaps
18 months ago, I and others posted proposed Delphi roadmaps after a challenge. The three main items I suggested for the next release were Stability, Unicode, and Generics. If we look at the latest official roadmap, you will see that is exactly what they are doing.
When we posted our roadmaps we were fire bombed and told we wrong. I'm extremely happy to see that Delphi is finally moving in the right direction. It's just a shame that so much time was lost in the process.
What's Next?
I think it is too early to say. It is no secret that Delphi's numbers have shrunk even more in the last 18 months and it is easy to see this by looking at internet activity, newsgroups, and conference attendance. However there still is a sizable core of Delphi users remaining. Interestingly, most of this core are small and independent shops, which were the original crowd who popularized Delphi 1.0.
For native development Microsoft offers only C++. If Delphi can continue to catch up and then advance, it quite possibly could survive by focusing on native code, especially with 64 bit support. The strategy would be to be the big fish in the small pond, rather than trying to be a fresh small fish in the big lake. Of course, this has been mentioned before.
So the only real question is: Is it too little, too late? First, it is not too little. There are finally real concrete steps being made. So, is it too late? Well it is most definitely late. A lot of damage has been done to the user base and ecosystem. But no, it is not too late. Delphi will never likely return to its high, but there definitely is life left if Delphi can stay on the current track.
I'm watching with hopeful yet cautious optimism.
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