Is it worth resubscribing now?

[Attila Kovacs 631]

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since the release of Berlin U2, and I'm starting to feel that I need a more recent version and there is this September discount until the 30th..

Is the current one as stable as Berlin?

 

[Alexander Sviridenkov 360]

11 is at least more responsive. But code completion and navigation works from time to time.

[Pat Foley 52]

I thinking to 'upgrade' to Enterprise  I been able to debug over one screen vs two screens, 11.3 is as lithe and cat quick like D3.    

[Brian Evans 109]

For me 11.x series and 11.3 specifically has been a high point but for small reasons - like GetIt no longer being glacially slow bringing up the list of packages and the IDE having more polish / performance in my use of it. Just feels nicer to me subjectively. Some growing pains in the updated IDE and other features but they are, granted too slow for some, improving. 

 

There are sometimes offers of discounts on longer maintenance periods and I took the bait last year on a 5-year renewal. 

 

As usual a lot depends on how many third-party components need to be renewed / replaced to migrate to a newer Delphi if your current development environment has stayed static for a while. 

[dummzeuch 1517]

There have definitely been some improvements in the Delphi 11 IDE, but also quite a few bugs, in particular in the support for HighDPI. Most of them have been fixed in 11.3, but it's far from flawless. But you might never encounter some of these bugs, depending on the hardware you are using.

 

I can't really compare to Berlin because I have never used it. The version that currently works best for me is 10.2 (Tokyo).

 

I'm looking forward to Delphi 12 though: New Features, hopefully some bugfixes and very likely new bugs. (I'm not in the Beta, so this is purely guesswork.)

Edited September 27, 2023 by dummzeuch

[MichaelT 6]

Give it a try first. If you are satisfied the upgrade will pay.

 

I mostly use 10.3.2 (Rio) and 10.4.1 (Sydney) (which includes the LSP fixes from 10.4.2) in a certain advanced trial mode on my old Laptop with no working accumulator and not even a working battery in fact always plugged in but with Win 8.1 and a working Delphi installed (simply because of the Client Server Add-On pack). I fairly use Code Insight but prefer the old not LSP based one, but the LSP based works amazingly great as long as Code Completion relying on it works. Sometimes Cleaning the project directory helps. This laptop is equipped with a hard-disk and just a hard-disk.

 

11.3 is installed on my new a Win 10 Laptop I fairly use but it does it's job so far. I don't have to maintain large code bases.

 

Berlin is/was a great release indeed.

 

In worst case you could step back to 11.2 for example. The overall experience with RAD Studio 11.x including 11.3 is satisfactory. The IDE seems to be very responsive but I cannot offer the results of a direct comparison on the same computer which in case of the new machine is more or less a gaming laptop from hell and dead fast in general. This makes a/the difference if I think of full RAD-Studio Enterprise but just for Windows and Linux installed and using all the features made available. This works definitely smooth without delays.

 

I think others can share their experience with Code Insight and they are a more viable source. Again, in general I tend to think that 11.x is an improvement over Rio and Sidney, that's my overall impression.

[Attila Kovacs 631]

@MichaelT Thank you very much!

 

1 hour ago, dummzeuch said:

I'm looking forward to Delphi 12 though: New Features, hopefully some bugfixes and very likely new bugs. (I'm not in the Beta, so this is purely guesswork.)

I see. So I shouldn't be concerned about the quality of version 11, since version 12 is just around the corner? Or 11.4 first?

We did not have luck with even version numbers yet.

 

Looks like the only question is whether this LSP is working or not. When you say it works 'time to time,' do you need to restart the IDE or a service, or do you have no impact on it?

Or does it just fail in specific places or units? Like the old one?

 

 

 

Edited September 27, 2023 by Attila Kovacs

[Uwe Raabe 2064]

2 minutes ago, Attila Kovacs said:

do you need to restart the IDE or a service, or do you have no impact on it?

Is there a way to setup a shortcut to "re-run" the Delphi LSP instances?

[DelphiUdIT 187]

My experience:

Laptop PC less than two years old, 32GB and SSD.
Win 11 and WSL / VirtualBox

Rad Studio 11.3 Enterprise, MIcrosoft Studio, etc ...

 

A VCL project with 50 personal units and 30 Forms with Styles, TChart, Indy, FastReport.
Manual TThread implementation, various third-party libraries with "self-produced" wrappers including a computer vision library.

The "project group" has several other projects including C++ for hardware support DLL libraries

Compilation, for one project, of about 400 thousand lines (I don't use BPL).

Memory occupation during work (including compilations):

- Delphi approximately 450 Mbytes,
- LSP approximately 300 Mbytes.

 

I've never had problems with LSP (or at least I've never noticed), codeinsight is set automatically and responds correctly (you rarely have to use the keyboard shortcut to give it a "boost"). The "Help Insight tooltip" always works well too.

I use Parnassus Debugger, and I must say that every now and then the debugger "crashes" and it is better to restart the IDE. But when I debug I normally have something like 50 instantiated manual threads, many that interact with the hardware and others that instantiate very heavy third-party libraries.

 

I must say that as an experience it is certainly positive.

 

Bye

Edited September 27, 2023 by DelphiUdIT

[Vincent Parrett 763]

I didn't use Berlin (I did try but had too many issues) - went from XE7 to 10.4.2 (failed again due to issues) - and then 11.x - 11.3 is not perfect but it's usable. 

 

My project is a few exe's and around 100 packages (32bit vcl) - around 4M lines of code. IDE using 600MB, LSP 400MB. I have not run into any out of memory issues with 11.3 - I have had issues with code insight occasionally stops working, but found my old trick of closing the project, deleting the .identcache seems to get it working again. 

 

Like every release in the last 10 years, the debugger isn't great  but is usable for the most part - the 64bit debugger is pretty flakey (along with the compiler) - so for now I'm sticking to 32bit. 

 

YMMV.

 

[MichaelT 6]

On 9/27/2023 at 8:41 PM, Uwe Raabe said:

Is there a way to setup a shortcut to "re-run" the Delphi LSP instances?

Thank you very much Uwe!

[MichaelT 6]

On 9/27/2023 at 8:38 PM, Attila Kovacs said:

@MichaelT Thank you very much!

 

I see. So I shouldn't be concerned about the quality of version 11, since version 12 is just around the corner? Or 11.4 first?

We did not have luck with even version numbers yet.

 

I'd say, simply give it a try.

 

I personally don't use Code Insight and/or in a very limited way. Code Completion is turned on and autoinvoke is not used in general. Anything else sugar for me.

 

So what happend. I simple switched to Code Insight based on LSP away from classic in 10.4.1 with target 32-bit enabled on an open project and methods added to a class and procedures/functions added to a module didn't show up first. Closing the project helped and cleaning the project directory too. Afterwards I switch to 64-bit build target, no idea if that had an impact, thins started to work. Later I started to add one feature after the other. I was surprised that Error Insight for example works pretty smooth, apart from a few minor glitches/optical irritations. The moment the modules interface becomes more stable, the better the experience turned out to be.

 

Now it's possible to add many more features surrounding the core editing features and those show speed improvements compared to the classic Code Insight. Delphi has never been bug free, but the moment existing problems were fixed and others showed up in other places 'just a few people needed' the IDE became very usable in the past too.

 

The absence of methods, functions and procedures in Code Completion is something was obvious. So I started to investigate deeper. Doing so makes people unhappy and the focus turns to occurrences that show up a lot less later in practice or seemingly go away. I'm happy about things that work. After years I turned on code navigation for example and help/information automatically generated from comments when the mouse is moves over a symbol. That's very helpful.

 

Honestly I cannot comment on anything else, but my simply sit down and write a test application from scratch worked pretty smooth in 11.x starting with 11.2. 11.1 I simply missed.

 

In practice I don't use too many sophisticated coding features, because few IDEs offer so much and many things working also in detail over time once they become stable. I have no idea about the whole bunch of FMX related stuff like Android, Mac, iOS and such things. At the moment I don't care about those.

 

Since I'm a hobbyist I mostly turned to Freepascal/Lazarus on Linux in a first place and if fp would offer code completion I'd not even start the GUI service.

 

Coming back to your question? Don't wait with testing and hope for everything works great as announced in high glossy brochures. Expectations raised this way fairly turn into reality and in almost no place not just Embarcadero. My impression still is that the RAD-Studio in general has undergone major improvements. A working IDE is a matter of perception concerning things relevant to the developer. An in depth look shows that the RAD-Studio really works pretty well for what it does and to what extent it does it's job. The question concerning Delphi has always been, how much less would be more helpful. Imo a lot more beyond core editing will not help to make development better or the developer a better/skilled one.

[Michael Taylor 0]

On 9/27/2023 at 9:08 AM, Pat Foley said:

I thinking to 'upgrade' to Enterprise  I been able to debug over one screen vs two screens, 11.3 is as lithe and cat quick like D3.    

Is the upgrade from Pro to Enterprise worth it? I think it might be nice for Linux development if it worked on Raspberry Pis. Can I ask what you want to upgrade to Enterprise for?

[Pat Foley 52]

5 hours ago, Michael Taylor said:

I think it might be nice for Linux development if it worked on Raspberry Pis. Can I ask what you want to upgrade to Enterprise for?

chiefly for the WSL stuff, that would allow learning/running Linux faster than running a Linux box? That was two days ago now I want buy a box to run win pro 11 on it to learn if remote debugging on windows 64 machine using a windows 32 machine would allow faster recompiling.  Still there is regret that I didn't jump on the 20% discount(When I bought the D10.2 with mobile on sale 2000 days ago.  In a month found a newer computer to install it on by then 10.3 was available.)

 

Raspberry Pi it's just another mouth to feed not in the money involved but in time used in learning curve of what works and how it works.  Learning Python first maybe best for Linux development getting the Pi aspect for free that's my new plan. For windows I think I deserve a p16 or even an HP.