Delphi 11.3 : FORSAKEN

[gioma 8]

I want to share my disappointment with you.
I work with Delphi 11.3 (Patch 1) and every day I see amazing things.

Starting with Code Insight, which works 1 out of 3 times. Then, when it stops working, there is no way to reactivate it.

The new feature that allows you to highlight the selected words in the code works badly, often when I select a word with a double click the document is moved and becomes unreadable until I scroll through the document, this thing makes me waste a LOT of TIME.
It is also dangerous because you risk to write in another part of the code! (it happened to me...)

When I am working on the graphical interface of a form, it can happen that the IDE freezes completely and I have to force the PID to close!

Sometimes the compiler goes "out of memory" and in the best case you can save and close Delphi, in the worst case Delphi crashes and you lose the work you've done if you haven't saved it.

And those are just the biggest problems, I'll leave the rest out.

Now I learn that Delphi 12 is being released, but how can Embarcadero offer me a new version of Delphi? And the Delphi 11 bugs, WHO CAN SOLVE THEM?
The last update to Delphi 11 was in APRIL!!!!

This means that I should update to Delphi 12, which will certainly have NEW BUGS and will not have fixed the bugs of version 11 (as happened to me every time I changed versions...).

When do you think we will be able to go on like this? Visual Studio is updated EVERY WEEK.
I have to work every day with an IDE that slows me down and most of all with an IDE that NO ONE MAINTAINS!
I would like someone like Marco Cantù to explain to me why Embarcadero is destroying the trust of their customers in this way, why they are neglecting the essentials to continue blowing smoke in our faces.

Sorry for the outburst, but it's really frustrating to work like this.

[Der schöne Günther 306]

To be honest, I don't think any of this is new - It's been like this for several years now. I've just come to accept it.

 

Over the last years, the IDE has gotten better, but just cannot compete with others , it's in a league of its own. For example, Visual Studio 2017 got its last bugfix in August 2023. Now imagine Delphi 10.2 still getting fixes...

[gioma 8]

3 minutes ago, Der schöne Günther said:

To be honest, I don't think any of this is new - It's been like this for several years now. I've just come to accept it.

  

Over the last years, the IDE has gotten better, but just cannot compete with others , it's in a league of its own. For example, Visual Studio 2017 got its last bugfix in August 2023. Now imagine Delphi 10.2 still getting fixes...

Unfortunately, I know that this is the case, but I don't think it's the right and most importantly respectful way to go for the companies that continue to invest in Delphi.
Imagine that those upgrading to Delphi 12 now have to reinstall all the components without any certainty that the old bugs have been fixed. In fact, it's almost certain that the bugs are still there!

Why should I, as a software company, think about developing a new application using Delphi? I mean, having used this IDE for twenty years, I would never think of it!

Delphi is staying afloat thanks to all the applications that are still hanging on, but what happens when they are finished?

I mean, even though my project consists of hundreds of thousands of lines of code, I have often thought about moving on to something else, and I have built some of his modules using Visual Studio.

I do not understand or agree with Embarcadero's policy of not releasing bug fixes on a regular basis and instead releasing a new version of Delphi every year.

[Der schöne Günther 306]

7 minutes ago, gioma said:

Why should I, as a software company, think about developing a new application using Delphi? I mean, having used this IDE for twenty years, I would never think of it!

Us neither. But we still consider it to be a very capable tool for prototyping and drafts, and still to be less painful to use than to rewrite a product that goes back almost 25 years while still supporting and extending the legacy application at the same time.

 

7 minutes ago, gioma said:

Delphi is staying afloat thanks to all the applications that are still hanging on, but what happens when they are finished?

I believe that clinging to the legacy market is completely legit. Of course, I'd like to have an IDE that is a flexible and snappy as VS Code, a Delphi language which is as cool as Rust, and a form designer that does not suck balls. But I've come to peace that Delphi is, for us, the correct choice for maintaining the older projects, while using it for completely new projects would most probably be a mistake.

Edited October 23, 2023 by Der schöne Günther

[Brian Evans 83]

Short answer: No test case no fix.

 

They do squash bugs when they have good descriptions and can be reproduced reliably. That makes it possible to see, understand, debug, fix and confirm the fix. The release and patch cycles are a bit slow, but it is what it is at this point. 

 

I have solved similar freezing issues before, but none were due to Delphi itself. Windows APIs tend to hang when trying to access non-existent network resources. Some old projects referenced common libraries on network shares on servers long gone but still in DNS. Strangest case was dead batteries in a RAID card which caused a Windows cluster to not use write caching - writes were only considered done when they hit the physical disks. Throughput dropped hilariously low for the hardware involved bottlenecking everything. That makes finding a freezing issue in Delphi itself harder without a way to reproduce as what a customer sees might not be due to Delphi itself. 

 

Seems like a catch-22 at this point: the freezing robs time from the same people we need to spend time on troubleshooting and trying to find a test case. 

[Der schöne Günther 306]

That's true for wonky edge cases, but I believe it is not the end customers job to write unit tests, especially when brand new features (which were used to justify a major version bump) struggle to get the basics done (LLVM-based compiler in C++ Builder, Delphi's LSP-based code completion, ...)

[Mike Torrettinni 198]

3 hours ago, gioma said:

Sorry for the outburst, but it's really frustrating to work like this.

 

I agree with your conclusions and as said above, it's been the same with small improvements for years, so I just accepted it.

 

I use these 'tricks' on a daily basis and consider them as part of development workflow:

- highlighting words fails when code is folded, so I unfold all the code in unit I work on

- use Kill task to kill LSP multiple times a day (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74164165/is-there-a-way-to-setup-a-shortcut-to-re-run-the-delphi-lsp-instances)

- when IDE starts acting up (bookmarks behaving strangely, watch window shows odd values, debugger hangs or slows down...) - restart IDE

- search will likely start with Whole words checked, so check the status of Whole words regularly

- 64 bit debugger requires special attention, so handle with care and don't be impatient

and probably some more that I can't remember right now...

 

[gioma 8]

40 minutes ago, Brian Evans said:

Short answer: No test case no fix.

 

They do squash bugs when they have good descriptions and can be reproduced reliably. That makes it possible to see, understand, debug, fix and confirm the fix. The release and patch cycles are a bit slow, but it is what it is at this point. 

 

I have solved similar freezing issues before, but none were due to Delphi itself. Windows APIs tend to hang when trying to access non-existent network resources. Some old projects referenced common libraries on network shares on servers long gone but still in DNS. Strangest case was dead batteries in a RAID card which caused a Windows cluster to not use write caching - writes were only considered done when they hit the physical disks. Throughput dropped hilariously low for the hardware involved bottlenecking everything. That makes finding a freezing issue in Delphi itself harder without a way to reproduce as what a customer sees might not be due to Delphi itself. 

 

Seems like a catch-22 at this point: the freezing robs time from the same people we need to spend time on troubleshooting and trying to find a test case. 

The fact that the IDE gives an "out of memory" error and freezes is not due to the operating system but to the Delphi engine which jams over time. In fact, the longer you keep Delphi open, the slower it will be to compile or debug. I have a 64-bit project and I had to give up debugging as it is extremely slow and inefficient (some functions can take minutes) despite taking up little RAM and CPU cycles.😭

 

I would like to point out that time is money for professional programmers, so I cannot and must not waste time patching software that should make my life easier and for which I pay a high price.

 

20 minutes ago, Mike Torrettinni said:

 

I agree with your conclusions and as said above, it's been the same with small improvements for years, so I just accepted it.

 

I use these 'tricks' on a daily basis and consider them as part of development workflow:

- highlighting words fails when code is folded, so I unfold all the code in unit I work on

- use Kill task to kill LSP multiple times a day (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74164165/is-there-a-way-to-setup-a-shortcut-to-re-run-the-delphi-lsp-instances)

- when IDE starts acting up (bookmarks behaving strangely, watch window shows odd values, debugger hangs or slows down...) - restart IDE

- search will likely start with Whole words checked, so check the status of Whole words regularly

- 64 bit debugger requires special attention, so handle with care and don't be impatient

and probably some more that I can't remember right now...

 

As mentioned above, time is money and restarting the IDE 5/6 times a day is an unthinkable waste of time!😥

 

I hope someone who works for Embarcadero reads this post and realises what programming in Delphi means today.

NB
I love the Delphi language, but I can't program in Delphi 2007 (which doesn't cause major problems and therefore doesn't waste time writing code...) in 2023!

[Vandrovnik 202]

3 hours ago, gioma said:

I have a 64-bit project and I had to give up debugging as it is extremely slow and inefficient (some functions can take minutes) despite taking up little RAM and CPU cycles.😭

 

May be you could debug mostly the 32-bit version of the application and just some parts in 64-bit debugger?

Edited October 23, 2023 by Vandrovnik

[Brandon Staggs 185]

7 hours ago, gioma said:

Now I learn that Delphi 12 is being released, but how can Embarcadero offer me a new version of Delphi? And the Delphi 11 bugs, WHO CAN SOLVE THEM?

It's been this way since Delphi 1. May as well not wish for a perfect "bug free" release before a new release comes. They'd be out of business. By now we should all understand that in order to benefit from bug fixes, we need to be on subscription, and we will have to upgrade to new versions with new bugs to watch out for. It is what it is.

 

And I agree there are frustrating problems with the IDE, but frankly, most of what you described sounds a lot like a misbehaving package you have installed in the IDE. Especially since you say you get freezing while editing a form. If I were in your position I would be looking into figuring out what packages I may be using causing the IDE to be unstable. Remember, this is Delphi, all those design-time packages are DLLs loaded into the process of the IDE...

Edited October 23, 2023 by Brandon Staggs

[aehimself 388]

4 hours ago, gioma said:

As mentioned above, time is money and restarting the IDE 5/6 times a day is an unthinkable waste of time!😥

 

Even at work, where we have DevExpress and a number of other, chunky components installed the IDE loads our big legacy project up in less than 20 seconds. Add 10-15 more seconds of compiling and I am in debugging.

Compare that with VS2019, which needs ~1min until IntelliSense kicks in, 1,5 min of compiling, 10 seconds of after-compilation-thinking and finally the project launches.

 

I'm sure there are faster IDEs out there, but Delphi really isn't that bad from startup perspective.

[JonRobertson 39]

Although I wish Delphi had fewer defects, I wish my own software did as well. ;)

 

Keep in mind that the stability could be caused by an add-on, if you have any installed. When I started using Delphi 11 on a daily basis, it was crashing at least 5 or 6 times a day. It crashed after every single "run with debugging" session ended. And it typically threw exceptions any time I closed the IDE (even if no other exceptions had occurred during that instance). Luckily I had a pattern to investigate.

 

Immediately after I installed Delphi 11, I opened Get-It to see what was available. One of the add-ons I installed was Parallel Debugger from Parnassus. Once I uninstalled Parallel Debugger, the IDE immediately became mostly stable. Since uninstalling Parallel Debugger helped so much, I also uninstalled their Bookmarks add-on.

 

For me now, Delphi 11.3 may throw an exception once a week.

[JohnLM 10]

Specs: Delphi 11.2, Win7

 

My experience thus far with D11.2 under Win7. . . 

 

I have worked in Delphi for many years.  I can't remember ever having the IDE crash (or freeze) on me, ever until I started working with Classes and Generics.  Granted, I am new to that area.  But we all have to start somewhere, and crashes/freezes will happen when using advanced areas of coding.  Now that I am in the classes and generics area of programming I am finding that the IDE will crash or freeze often, though mostly in access violation territory while closing the app as I learn, etc.  For example, yesterday while testing some code, the IDE froze and was unresponsive.  And I could not close down the faulty app in Task Manager.  After 10 minutes of frustration, I learned that the DSP had crashed (it was showing 25% usage on my win7 laptop in Task Manager--the 25% CPU value is the default value for when an app or something for that matter has crashed or become unresponsive)  I could not do anything in Delphi and/or the App in question until I killed the process for the DSP.  Then, I had to shut down Delphi and reload that project.  in my unique case, I discovered that Delphi 11.2 no longer works properly with the Class/Generic app I was working with. It constantly crashes with access violations.  In order to resolve this, I have to shut down my laptop completely.  It would not be such a problem if my laptop did not take 40 minutes to boot up--a situation that I have not been able to figure out how to resolve.--it used to boot up in under a minute when brand new. I don't know where nor when exactly this long boot-up started.  Anyway.  So crashes like this I can't afford to have with a 40-minute bootup every time I encounter this sort of major Delphi crash.  But this type of crash is difficult to document exactly how it happens in Delphi. 

[gioma 8]

13 hours ago, Brandon Staggs said:

It's been this way since Delphi 1. May as well not wish for a perfect "bug free" release before a new release comes. They'd be out of business. By now we should all understand that in order to benefit from bug fixes, we need to be on subscription, and we will have to upgrade to new versions with new bugs to watch out for. It is what it is.

 

And I agree there are frustrating problems with the IDE, but frankly, most of what you described sounds a lot like a misbehaving package you have installed in the IDE. Especially since you say you get freezing while editing a form. If I were in your position I would be looking into figuring out what packages I may be using causing the IDE to be unstable. Remember, this is Delphi, all those design-time packages are DLLs loaded into the process of the IDE...

I have a subscription.. I understand that Delphi has always done this, but if something is wrong, should we keep doing it until the end of time?

The IDE is unstable even without packages, but haven't you noticed that the longer you keep it open, the slower it gets? I use it 8-10 hours a day.

 

10 hours ago, JonRobertson said:

Although I wish Delphi had fewer defects, I wish my own software did as well. 😉

My software isn't perfect either, but I fix known bugs, I don't leave them there forever.. Software that doesn't fix giant bugs is dead software.

 

10 hours ago, JonRobertson said:

 

Immediately after I installed Delphi 11, I opened Get-It to see what was available. One of the add-ons I installed was Parallel Debugger from Parnassus. Once I uninstalled Parallel Debugger, the IDE immediately became mostly stable. Since uninstalling Parallel Debugger helped so much, I also uninstalled their Bookmarks add-on.

 

For me now, Delphi 11.3 may throw an exception once a week.

I have only installed plug-ins developed by Embarcadero included in my subscription.

 

12 hours ago, aehimself said:

Even at work, where we have DevExpress and a number of other, chunky components installed the IDE loads our big legacy project up in less than 20 seconds. Add 10-15 more seconds of compiling and I am in debugging.

Compare that with VS2019, which needs ~1min until IntelliSense kicks in, 1,5 min of compiling, 10 seconds of after-compilation-thinking and finally the project launches.

VS2019 is obsolete, you can easily switch to VS2022 (I have converted all my projects without any major problems), but in any case I have never had any problems loading projects.

 

NB:
My PC has fairly recent and high-performance hardware:
Intel i7 10700
16GB DDR4 RAM
NVIdia Quadro P620
Samsung SSD 990 PRO

[Sherlock 632]

11 hours ago, JohnLM said:

Specs: Delphi 11.2, Win7

 

My experience thus far with D11.2 under Win7. . . 

Now gee, what do you expect? How many of your clients demand to run your software on their outdated, unsupported and insecure operating systems (Windows 98 SE was sweet)? And what do you tell them? Even Microsoft has abandoned that product. Seriously, as long as you are using Windows 7 you will get nothing but sympathetic nods as every little issue could be blamed on the fact you are trying to run it on an OS that does not meet the requirements. Nevertheless 11.3 is the current version, so some of your issues may have gotten fixed.

[gioma 8]

2 hours ago, Sherlock said:

Now gee, what do you expect? How many of your clients demand to run your software on their outdated, unsupported and insecure operating systems (Windows 98 SE was sweet)? And what do you tell them? Even Microsoft has abandoned that product. Seriously, as long as you are using Windows 7 you will get nothing but sympathetic nods as every little issue could be blamed on the fact you are trying to run it on an OS that does not meet the requirements. Nevertheless 11.3 is the current version, so some of your issues may have gotten fixed.

I expect Delphi 11.3 to get updates and bug fixes a year after its release.

I'm not using Windows 7, I'm using Windows 11 and if you're referring to the joke I wrote above "I can't use Delphi 7 in 2023", it was to say that Delphi 7 is the last Delphi that is not affected by major bugs... but I'm using Delphi 11.3 which hasn't been updated since April 2023, which is UNACCEPTABLE!

[Sherlock 632]

14 minutes ago, gioma said:

I expect Delphi 11.3 to get updates and bug fixes a year after its release.

I'm not using Windows 7, I'm using Windows 11 and if you're referring to the joke I wrote above "I can't use Delphi 7 in 2023", it was to say that Delphi 7 is the last Delphi that is not affected by major bugs... but I'm using Delphi 11.3 which hasn't been updated since April 2023, which is UNACCEPTABLE!

Please read my post carefully, I answered @JohnLM. Your frustration is valid. I have felt it more than once myself.

[aehimself 388]

7 hours ago, gioma said:

VS2019 is obsolete, you can easily switch to VS2022 (I have converted all my projects without any major problems), but in any case I have never had any problems loading projects.

The VS2022 you mean which ate up all 16 gigs of memory just when loading the project on all of the developer PCs, finally crashing the OS itself? Not sure if it got fixed since then, but the same project works just fine in 2019; this is why we are not switching. And btw, VS2019 still receives patches.

 

We are all biased, we all have a preference towards one IDE or an other. The important thing is to stay objective even when we get frustrated.

[Brandon Staggs 185]

8 hours ago, gioma said:

I have a subscription.. I understand that Delphi has always done this, but if something is wrong, should we keep doing it until the end of time?

The IDE is unstable even without packages, but haven't you noticed that the longer you keep it open, the slower it gets? I use it 8-10 hours a day.

I am not aware of any software that I use that refrains from releasing new versions until the current release version is bug free. Perhaps there are exceptions, but that is just not how software development generally works. To be clear, I don't think it's unreasonable to want Embarcadero to fix bugs, I do too. But complaining about Delphi 12 coming just because Delphi 11.3 isn't bug-free is not reasonable or useful, IMO.

 

For what it's worth, I use Delphi 11.3 all day long. It is the most stable Delphi has been for me in years. I do not regularly experience the kinds of problems you describe, and pretty much every time I have, I could track it down to a component package. I do often have to restart Delphi when I am rebuilding packages or changing packages. It's an area that could use some work but I also understand what is happening -- I have a lot of components installed and any bugs in those components can affect the whole IDE.

 

My biggest complaints have to do with invalid syntax highlighting between ifdefs that the IDE isn't interpreting correctly although compiler works properly. And, CTRL+Clicking doesn't always locate a symbol definition when CTRL+G does, and vice-versa (so I can't just use one or the other, I am often forced to try both methods).

 

But, right now, I am able to use the IDE all day long with relatively minimal frustrations.

 

I'm not trying to disregard the issues you are having, but being realistic means understanding that if Delphi is going to get bug fixes, they have to be able to get revenue, which means sustaining subscriptions, which means shipping new features. As I said before, it is what it is.

[jonnyg 4]

This is going off-topic.
@JohnLM  A couple of thoughts about your laptop's slow boot . . .
- A friend's old laptop had also become slow to boot.  Running a diagnostic app (can't remember which, maybe one of the Crystal utilities) showed the hdd was running hot.  When that was replaced, speed was "normal" again.  
- A fresh OS install can sometimes improve performance.  Also, not sure if it's still available, but Win10 used to be a free upgrade from Win7 -- that might be worth checking into, while Win10 is still accessible.  

[JohnLM 10]

@ jonnyg - I have a Windows 10 laptop 64GB (eMMC) and 4GB of ram, and with Delphi 11.2 installed and running fine. I had stopped using it because it ran down my remaining hdd (eMMC) space down to about 400mb, but recently I learned that I regained some of it back and now have 2.5GB space left, more than enough to continue my small casual Delphi hobbies.  I use my win7 laptop as my main workstation.  It has XE7 and D11.2 on it. I sometimes run both side-by-side when necessary.  I have no problems with D11.2, except for that recent rare occasion I just mentioned in my previous post. 

[jonnyg 4]

@JohnLM  Referencing your earlier post, you mentioned a Win7 laptop.  And you go on to say:
>> It would not be such a problem if my laptop did not take 40 minutes to boot up--a situation that I have not been able to figure out how to resolve.--it used to boot up in under a minute when brand new. 

 

That's what I was commenting about.  What am I missing?

[JohnLM 10]

@ jonnyg - you are correct. I got side-tracked. The days of doing a fresh install on that win7 laptop are long gone now. I have too many large apps installed and other complicated issues that prevent me from doing that and is also the reason I have another laptop or two. They are all win10. I will eventually replace this laptop with one of those. I'm just not ready nor in any rush to make that happen as yet. 

[DiGi 14]

Wait what? Nobody is talking about broken refactoring?

[gioma 8]

21 hours ago, aehimself said:

The VS2022 you mean which ate up all 16 gigs of memory just when loading the project on all of the developer PCs, finally crashing the OS itself? Not sure if it got fixed since then, but the same project works just fine in 2019; this is why we are not switching. And btw, VS2019 still receives patches.

 

We are all biased, we all have a preference towards one IDE or an other. The important thing is to stay objective even when we get frustrated.

Visual Studio 2019 is still getting patches, it has been getting patches for at least 4 years.
Delphi 13 is no longer receiving patches.

20 hours ago, Brandon Staggs said:

I am not aware of any software that I use that refrains from releasing new versions until the current release version is bug free. Perhaps there are exceptions, but that is just not how software development generally works. To be clear, I don't think it's unreasonable to want Embarcadero to fix bugs, I do too. But complaining about Delphi 12 coming just because Delphi 11.3 isn't bug-free is not reasonable or useful, IMO.



That's not what I said or claim.

The only patch for Delphi 11.3 was released in April and they haven't released anything since.
After a little over a year, Delphi 11.3 was left to fend for itself.

Embarcadero's policy so far has been to release new versions and not update older versions. 
This policy is unacceptable to me, because often subsequent versions not only have new bugs (due to new features), but also carry bugs from previous versions that were never fixed.
Not to mention the fact that every time you install the new version of Delphi you MUST necessarily install all the components.

I repeat: I do not pretend that Delphi is bug-free, but that known bugs are fixed, because this is a product we pay dearly for.