History of programming languages: Delphi is more than just a language

Delphi is usually associated with an application development environment based on the Object Pascal language, developed by Borland. This language is the successor of Turbo Pascal with object-oriented extensions, which in turn leads its history from the "pure" Pascal, created by Niklaus Wirth in 1970.

Subsequently, in 2002, the developers at Borland officially put an equal sign between Delphi and Object Pascal.

Prehistory

The original Pascal, according to its developers, had the fastest compiler in the world. Moreover, together with it, the technology of creating platform-independent programs was developed for the first time, which has found wide application in a language like Java.
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However, his IDE, if this concept can be applied to the development environment of that time, functioned only on the basis of the DOS operating system.

With the advent of Windows, it became necessary to create a software development environment for this platform. The most popular solution for personal Windows computers in the 80s - early 90s was the compiler and IDE Turbo Pascal from Borland. The built-in compiler provided high compilation speed and high quality code (hence the Turbo prefix). The Turbo Pascal environment also provided code debugging and contained a rich set of examples. All these qualities for some time allowed Turbo Pascal to become the standard of the Pascal language.

Time challenge

In Windows, the graphical interface began to develop quite quickly, while the IDE Turbo Pascal still used a DOS-like interface. Gradually, Microsoft realized that it was necessary to move in the direction of programming “visualization”.

To create a simple program, developers had to write several pages of code: prescribe large blocks of code for menus and windows, fonts, clear memory, “draw” buttons, etc. However, the advantages of the Windows GUI were quite strong, so it was necessary to support the development of the operating system. Microsoft realized that it was necessary to somehow make life easier for developers. Therefore, in the 90s, the company launched several parallel projects to create a new programming language and development environment for Windows. The first sign was Visual Basic.



The perspectives of the Pascal language in this respect were far from rosy. By the mid-90s, he was already in a rather neglected state. Borland began to refine it, but it soon became clear: the changes and additions would be so serious that the result of this work can be considered a new programming language. For the new language IDE was developed with a graphical interface. New programming environment and language received the common name Delphi.

The new system (Delphi) got its name in honor of the ancient Greek city of Delphi. The name was chosen for a reason: the city of Delphi is associated with the name of the god of wisdom and the patron of the arts of Apollo. According to legend, the main sanctuary of Apollo was located in this city. His priestess-sibyls spoke prophecies to those who wanted to know their fate.

“The name Delphi was suggested by Denny Thorpe during a brainstorming session. We wanted the name of the system to reflect the unique abilities of the product to work with databases, and Delphi is perfectly compatible with such a deserved name in this area as Oracle, at least for those to whom the combination “Delphic Oracle” is about says, ”said Delphi’s system development team leader Chuck Yazdzhevski.

In Russia, Borland Delphi appeared at the end of 1993 and immediately gained great popularity.

Major versions

Version 1 was designed for development under the 16-bit Win16 platform. Starting from the second version, the possibility of compiling a program for a 32-bit Win32 platform was implemented.


Delphi 1

Version 3 introduced support for multi-tiered (multi-tiered) data access, which made it possible to create scalable applications (relatively weakly dependent on the database server) by transferring information processing methods (business rules) to the middle tier.


Delphi 3

Together with the 6th version of Delphi, the Kylix environment compatible with its language and libraries was released, designed to compile programs for the Linux operating system.



Version 8 is capable of generating bytecode exclusively for the .NET platform. This is the first environment focused on the development of multilingual applications (only for the .NET platform). Subsequent versions (denoted by years of release, rather than sequence numbers, as was the case previously) allowed the creation of both Win32 and .NET applications.

In Delphi 2006, it became possible to write applications for .NET using the standard .NET class library, VCL for .NET. The environment also allowed writing .NET applications in C # and Win32 applications in C ++. Delphi 2006 also implemented MDA (Model Driven Architecture) technology using ECO (Enterprise Core Objects) version 3.0.

What did you fight for

The development process in Delphi is extremely simplified. First of all, this refers to the creation of an interface, which takes 80% of the program development time. Simply drag the necessary components onto the surface of a Windows window (in Delphi it is called a form) and adjust their properties using a special tool (Object Inspector). With it, you can associate the events of these components (clicking a button, selecting an item in the list with the mouse, etc.) with its processing code.

The developer got at his disposal powerful debugging tools (up to step-by-step execution of processor commands), a convenient context-sensitive help system (including the Microsoft API), tools for team work on a project.

It became possible to create ActiveX components without using Microsoft IDL, expand the capabilities of a web server (server-side scripts), knowing almost nothing about HTML, XML or ASP.

Now you can create distributed applications based on COM and CORBA, Internet and intranet applications using Borland DataBase Engine, ODBC drivers or Microsoft ADO for data access.

In Delphi, developers were given the opportunity to create their own components, import OSH components, create project templates and wizards that generate project blanks. Moreover, the authors provided the developer with an interface for connecting other applications (or external programs) with the Delphi IDE.

Change

The new version of Delphi came out every year, but after the fifth, something seemed to happen ... Later it turned out that in parallel with the work on the new version of Delphi, a Delphi-like programming language for Linux was being developed. New product called Kylix. Delphi had a huge impact on the creation of the concept of the C # language for the .NET platform. Many of its elements and conceptual solutions have become part of C #. One of the reasons is called the transition from Anders Hejlsberg, one of the leading Delphi developers, from Borland Ltd. at Microsoft Corp.

In March 2006, Borland decided to halt the further development of integrated development environments of JBuilder, Delphi and C ++ Builder due to the unprofitability of this trend. The sale of the company's IDE sector was planned. A group of free software supporters organized a fundraiser to buy rights to the development environment and compiler from Borland. However, in November of the same year, it was decided to abandon the sale of IDE business.

After that, the development of IDE products began to engage in a new company - CodeGear, which was financially fully controlled by Borland.

In March 2007, CodeGear pleased users with the updated Delphi 2007 for Win32 product line and the release of a completely new Delphi 2007 for PHP product.



On August 25, 2008, Embarcadero, the new owner of CodeGear, published a press release on Delphi for Win32 2009. This version has many language-level innovations:

• By default, full Unicode support in all parts of the language, VCL and RTL;
• Replacing calls to all Windows API functions with unicode counterparts (that is, MessageBox calls MessageBoxW, not MessageBoxA).
• Generic types, they are generics.
• Anonymous methods.
• New compiler directive $ POINTERMATH [ON | OFF].
• The Exit function can now take parameters according to the type of function.

In the Delphi XE2 version (2011), the Win64 compiler and cross-compilation for Apple operating systems (MacOS X, iOS) were added.

Vsevolod Leonov, the Russian Delphi evangelist from Embarcadero Technologies, spoke about the following version in his interview :

Delphi XE3 product is a continuation of a new generation of tools for rapid development of the Delphi family. Let me remind you that in 2011 Delphi XE2 came out with the FireMonkey platform, which is an alternative to the library of visual components VCL.

It is very similar to VCL in terms of usage methods and component composition (buttons, tags, input fields, menus, etc.), but it has the ability to be transferred to another operating system. FireMonkey - cross-platform. Applications created using FireMonkey can be compiled under both Windows and Mac OS. Practically in one or two “clicks” we can rebuild the project for a fundamentally different operating system. Virtually all demo projects that ship with Delphi on the FireMonkey platform have two versions: one for Windows, the other for Mac OS. And for this you do not need to make changes to the source code of the application.

Released in 2013, the Delphi XE5 version provided cross-compilation of applications for devices on the ARM / Android platform.



In April 2016, Delphi 10.1 berlin appeared. Innovations:

• Object Pascal compiler and toolkit for 64-bit iOS;
• Support for universal iOS applications (including 32-bit and 64-bit binaries in the application package);
• Preview FireUI on mobile platforms;
• Preview on different devices;
• Advanced features of working with styles in a single interface designer, including universal styles and customization of Windows styles;
• The FireUI Device Manager allows you to change the specifications of available devices and add new devices;
• Controls Memo, ListView, Calendar, Switch for the iOS platform;
• The MapView component for mobile platforms (iOS and Android) that supports specialized interactive map libraries for each platform (developed by Apple and Google, respectively).

Neither alive nor dead

It is known that Delphi permanently "bury" or declare that it is impossible to live this way. They argue that the system has become monstrous, irrelevant, unsupported, inconvenient, some more ...

But it can be recalled that such an opinion is more common in the USA and Western Europe, where this language has never been popular. There, these considerations can be quite reasonable in many cases. But there are other countries where the situation may differ - the CIS countries and the rest of Eastern Europe.



Vsevolod Leonov agrees with this:

A small historical excursion about the countries of Eastern Europe. The education system of the former USSR was very strong in many aspects, but not in terms of application programming. In the early 90s, only those who had a certain specialty could learn how to gain access to a computer or learn to do something in modern development environments.

Entire faculties “flew past” fundamental programming courses. And the presence of Turbo Pascal with a low threshold of entry, and then the Delphi environment, which allows you to educate yourself in a good sense of the word, were able to saturate the IT industry with quite competent developers, as well as increase the national engineering level of application software development.

Thus, for the countries of the former social camp, the Pascal / Delphi bundle dramatically pulled the economy out of IT non-existence due to a very simple programming language and visual development environment based on ready-made components.

New open source hero

The most famous free implementation of the Pascal language is Free Pascal. In addition to the open source code, its main advantage is multiplatform, as well as support for various dialects.



On the basis of FreePascal created a free multiplatform IDE Lazarus , allowing you to work with Delphi projects. It is based on the Lazarus Component Library (LCL) visual component library.

List of declared supported platforms:

• Windows: 98, 2k, XP, Vista, 7, 32 and 64bit;
• FreeBSD / Linux: gtk 2.8 and qt4.5, 32 and 64bit;
• Mac OS X: 10.4, LCL is only 32bit, non-LCL can be 64bit.

On the other hand, as Delphi developed, it became increasingly cumbersome and of little use for learning programming. In addition, there is no free version of Delphi even for academic use. These factors led to the almost complete disappearance of Delphi from education.