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I'm porting to various environments, depending on the need of the application. I am almost finished with a port of a Mac application to Swift (using Xcode). Granted this was more of a rewrite but since our customer requires 64 bit support (so they can deploy to the Mac App Store) and refuses to pay us without 64 bit support so I had no choice. Since from a customers perspective the application is exactly the same I cannot charge for porting, especially since I was the one that convinced the customer to go with Delphi when we started this project two years ago.... I feel like an idiot for having defended Emba/Delphi and now I am paying the price... Other tools (mainly data analysis) I've ported to Python. This was also more of a rewrite and required a completely different mindset. My reservations "Python is just a script language" and "not type safe?" turned out to be completely unfounded; Properly written ("Pythonic") code is beautiful! Third party (open source) availability is simply amazing (micro-service architecture using ZeroMQ). I did briefly consider Lazarus but decided against it. I could not afford to take any risks (swift on Mac OS is basically a given w.r.t. support) and Python runs anywhere. Stubbornly staying with object pascal also "felt" wrong; if the tool/language I trusted and relied upon for 20 years betrayed me I might as well take a deep dive and go in a completely different direction. As a side-note: having seen what modern IDE's can do (Xcode/PyCharm) and what a joy they are to work with I highly doubt Emba will be able to catch up even if they start treating their customers as customers again. I'm not ruling out ever taking a subscription again but it is going to take some really impressive releases and flawless ethical behaviour for Emba to regain my trust.

Clarity is certainly not one of his strong points.

No, you just use TDatastore.Data1 whereever you need the value stored in that field. Basically the class vars of the TDatastore class are your global variables, they are just neatly packaged and hidden in the class.

I am using a Delphi beta under an Embarcadero NDA, so I suppose I cannot reveal what 64 bit target it is 😉

Yes, but nontheless I like the idea of a self-service portal. Given that this will really allow me to use my perpetual licenses without any further troubles. (I am clearly not intending to re-install twice per day but about every 12-20 months I clear my VMs to have a fresh system.)

I stumbled upon AES problems a month ago (using a two decades old code which worked ok) when it suddenly appeared that SizeOf(LongWord)=8 on Linux. I solved my problem by explicitly replacing LongWord -> UInt32, PLongWord -> PUInt32, array -> packed array and probably AnsiString -> RawByteString and something like this (I don't have the code at hand). At least these changes in the code helped to produce equal results in both Win32 and Linux64 versions. I do not know the internals of the Eidos implementation but probably the required changes are also minimal.

Embarcadero can't fire him; Idera purchased EMBT and he was the person Idera picked to oversee Delphi. I'm not sure this was his idea either. I heard it was Michael Swindell who came up with the Delphi Pro EULA change (as well as the bogus 3 million users figure) and he's not only still there, he's listed as "Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Management". Let's not rule him out as a suspect.

History will show that not firing him was the worst move by EMBT after this total betrayal of loyal customers..