Re: Delphi for XCode?

On 2007-12-15 21:16:00 +1100, Marco van de Voort <marcov@xxxxxxxx> said:

On 2007-12-11, Diego <diego> wrote:
No, it would not be a killer app. CodeGear would face the same
situation as they do with Microsoft's crated and controlled OS APIs.
They'd be many steps behind Apple's support of OS APIs.

Apple doesn't have a commercial toolchain yet. It messes with XCode a bit to
allow some apps to be generated, but it is no VS-like competitor.

It doesn't have to be a VS-like competitor. They are not in competition.

No. XCode is indeed not sold independantly. It is more a burden on Apple to
keep some developers interested in OS X. (and compared to e.g. Delphi or VS
doing a poor job)

A burden? It makes perfect sense for Apple to give out free dev tools. Get people coming in to develop for the Mac.



So IMHO the Kylix reference is bogus, since Kylix was always going to be a
hard sell to an audience that is used to free software. And way too early.
(it is what, 8 years after initial announcement or so?)

The thing is that developers on the Mac are also used to free software. They don't pay for dev tools. Whether it be Rails, PHP or Java or any language which is possible to develop in in XCode. They are all free and you're suggesting someone come along with something that is not free, plus a completely different language which has an ever decreasing market share in the mind of developers?


The Mac world codes in Obj-C, not Obj-Pascal.

There are several possible retributes to that:
- C# was .NET's language, but that didn't stop CG from Delphi.NET

Neither did it stop someone implementing Cobol.NET. What does that mean? The fact is the anyone other than MS are left way behind when it comes to dev tools that support the latest and greatest .NET technologies.

- A Mac devel doesn't have that much choice. A major development entrant in the
market could change that. And maybe also prefered language. But if Delphi
+C# persona was an option, why not objc ? You don't even need a new backend
since objc maps perfectly to C/C++ a backend they already have.
- Nobody says that existing macers are the main market. It could be about
allowing Delphi devels to also move to Mac.

Delphi devs are too few and far between to make any of this viable. If you want to move to the Mac there are two major choices, Obj-C or Java. If you want to do web apps then you've got Rails, PHP, etc.

On the Java though, if you want your app to be responsive, look good and not out of place with the OS, to not be a resource hog, then go with Objective-C. Avoid Java like the plague.

- Mac users make a significant bulk from the Lazarus users. So there is some
despair there.

Lazarus?! What's a Lazarus? :) No serious developer, who writes software for a living that people pay for, would ever develop an application for the Mac using Lazarus. It's like the Commodore 64 in 2007. A few die-hards persist with something. There's 20 of them they have an IRC group somewhere where they talk about their thing, talk about their woes with it....



Also that Apple creates the APIs.

So does Microsoft. Hasn't stopped them before.

Again (or is that again and again and again?) look how far behind CodeGear are because of it? That is why (I bet) CodeGear will put more resources in to their Win32 compiler than their .NET dev tools. Because win32 is almost sitting still. .NET is too fast a target for them to catch up with, let alone hit.

And Apple might be easier to
negotiate with than with MS that has an own commercial development division
that it might not be able to sponsor from OS sales forever due to anti
competition concerns.

Apple easier to negotiate with than Microsoft? :) Apple is more of a vault than MS is.


Even if you think XCode doesn't match up to a Delphi like IDE, it doesn't
matter. You will have a cooler IDE but you'll be years behind, just like
Delphi.NET is compared to VS.

Well, CG must do something, since it can't resell the same Delphi/BCB forever.
Delphi's share is probably eroding, and the number of users that autoupgrade
too.

Admitted, it doesn't have to be something like this (which is a bit business
as usual in another marketplace), it can also refocus on niches, or drop the
probably costly targeting to a community constiting for a non trivial
percentage out of fulltime professionals (and become something like
RealBasic, for the isolated developer and shareware author), or go more for
"embedded" (like earstwhile competitor Metrowerks did), or become the next
ActiveState.

But to make those decisions you need to know all the numbers, and I don't
pretend to know those because Kylix failed 8 years ago.

Just let go of the dream. It will not happen. If you (or anyone) wants to develop client applications for the Mac, learn Objective-C and use XCode.

Over and out.

.

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