Joseph MItzen

When 100% of Delphi developers were Windows users who just wanted a button they could push to cross-compile their code to Linux, they gave us a new framework and attempted to get the IDE itself to run on Linux. Linux desktop was barely even a thing then. In the modern era, when nothing cool starts on Windows anymore and according to Stack Overflow's survey less than 50% of developers develop on a Windows box, they give us a cross compiler and a Windows-only IDE. Delphi wasn't burned... it set itself on fire, repeatedly. It's no different from their decision that you have to pay $4,000 to target a free operating system.

Forward-looking statements relate to investors and profitability projections and have nothing to do with software feature roadmaps. More importantly, Idera is a privately-held company so no law about forward-looking statements would apply to them! They don't make roadmaps because in the early days they were notoriously late with everything (long before Idera bought them). They took polls to decide on the top five most-desired features and then shipped a version of Delphi that included none of them. Other things slipped past deadlines and users rightly called them out on this. That's when the road maps dried up. They just didn't want to be embarrassed anymore when they failed to deliver on time.

Who's "we" though? This is going to be another thing where the entire rest of the world does something and Embarcadero becomes the last to follow suit five or more years later (see supporting DVCS, type inference, etc.). ARM is a thing now, and it's never not going to be a thing. Samsung, HP, Asus all offer ARM laptops now, not just Microsoft.

There were never millions of Delphi users. That was a mistaken belief that got out of hand.

2025 is all about tariffs and dire wolves.

Whoops, missed the first one. That one said.... "Absolute Database is a file-based DBMS like Access, SQLite, FoxPro, dBase, Paradox. These are databases that were not originally designed for multi-user operation. When accessed over a network, the data from these files is always transferred. That has always been the case. While multi-user operation is possible, it should be limited to a maximum of 2 concurrent users. If you want to implement database access over a network and/or with multiple users, you need a server database like MySQL, MS SQL Server, or Oracle. This is a basic principle for approaching planning. The less data that is transferred over the network, the faster the access to the databases and their processing."

They can't... Donald Trump imposed a 15% tariff on English Wednesday (the United Kingdom announced they would challenge this via the World Trade Organization). Gemini translated it as... "Hello, I'm sure much has already been said here about Absolute Database and its practical application. It's not about ABS being a fast database, but rather about it being a desktop database that was written in Delphi itself and can be easily integrated into your Delphi project. A desktop database is generally only operated with a maximum of 2 users. I use it for demo projects that I can conveniently pass on for people to try out my projects. ABS is also very good for applications where I only use the data privately." I'm still not sure what the advantage of ABS is over SQLite and DuckDB unless you just want to use something written in Delphi, but there you go.

You should really show some examples of how the framework is used (meaning code examples) on your webpage.

Aren't they all just random bunches of alphanumeric characters?

To lower the temperature. It may be better to load up a few cores with processes and run the rest at their minimum speed than to have processes spread across all cores. This was actually a problem with Windows and some of the very early multicore AMD CPUs. Those CPUs had to run all cores at the same clock speed. Windows, which at that time was designed when multiple cores meant multiple CPUs, would move processes onto fewer cores because in a multi-CPU system this would reduce noise and heat. On these early AMD processors that resulted in, say, one core running at maximum speed, which would then require all the remaining cores to run at maximum clock speed as well. Microsoft had to put out a patch to change this behavior. This has become an issue again because now Intel has CPUs where some cores are high-powered and others are lower-powered but more efficient. OS schedulers now need to take this into account; I know the Linux kernel just received patches for dealing with this type of CPU more efficiently. And that's not even getting into issues with some AMD CPUs and memory, such as their X3D CPUs that have on-CPU memory. In the 16 core models (7950X3D) only 8 cores have access to the extra cache memory. Also, "AMD Ryzen has separate L3 for each quad-core cluster, so data transfer between core-clusters is slower than within a single core cluster. (And if all the cores are working on the same data, it will end up replicated in the L3 of each cluster.)" Scheduling is much more complicated nowadays in OSes! I think this lead to benchmark issues with the first of the latest gen AMD chips. Linux review sites gave rave reviews while Windows-oriented review sites gave poor reviews. Turns out there were issues with the Microsoft Windows scheduler that were affecting the performance which improved significantly on Windows after patching.

I'll bite... what other programming languages don't raise an exception when you divide by zero?

Who do they feel the need to keep the details secret from? All 27 other commercial Pascal IDE vendors?

The moral here is that private variables are almost as evil as threads. No one knows, forever and for all time, what anyone else might need to access in the future.

It all depends on the implementation. I believe JetBrains is offering their own LLM service in their IDEs now, but they've also added a completely local LLM that can perform whole-line auto completion. If hypothetically Embarcadero was offering their own LLM service, it could be turned on by default and people might not be happy about that. But I agree, as an excuse it seems a bit flimsy. I'm not sure why waiting longer would somehow lead to anything being more secure by design.

Apparently not. After just checking out their SQL Server update policies, I'm flabbergasted. This... this is not right. It's a nightmare. I remember when Oracle had a vulnerability where someone could log into a certain Oracle account without a password. I had an Internet-facing system set up at the time (fortunately not running Oracle). I checked the log the same day the Oracle vulnerability was revealed and there were at least 15 attempts to log in via that Oracle user account. THAT'S why you don't mix new features and updates. No one should have to choose between potentially introducing new bugs, vulnerabilities or incompatibilities and leaving a system vulnerable while a patch is tested. I remember a Delphi user (David Erbas-White?) running into this problem with Delphi. A new Delphi release came out that fixed a show-stopping bug he was experiencing. However, code that used to compile no longer did. Barry used to say that "If it compiles, it's valid Delphi". Marco said to David "This never should have compiled in the first place". Now David was faced with the choice of either getting his bug fixed at the price of breaking his code and requiring some redesign and rewriting, or having his current code compile but still be buggy. That's not a choice anyone should have to make. It's especially bad if the bug fixes are bundled with changes that break compatibility. As for the Windows OS, there's a reason the professional server space belongs to Linux of various flavors. Windows still hasn't figured out updating while Linux is moving to "atomic" updating for secure servers. In this setup, the file system is a read-only copy-on-write file system. This makes the system secure against malware. The update process is applied to a new file system snapshot. If it is successful, the OS is told to use the new snapshot on its next reboot (which will then be read-only as well). If for some reason this doesn't work right the system can always boot back into the previous snapshot. Security and ease of updating with minimal downtime (all the updating can be done while the system is still running). In this design the applications are installed via a container system, allowing installation without reboot, enhanced security, isolation of the application from the OS, atomic updating, etc.