Embarcadero’s Delphi Live conference is running this week, and there are some interesting reports coming out. Robert Love has the best summary I’ve found so far. As I understand it, the next Delphi is codenamed “Weaver” and adds Windows 7 support, including the Touch APIs. More interesting is that this will be followed at some point by “Project X”, a cross-platform native code compiler for Windows, Mac and Linux. There is also mention of “Project Commodore”, which brings full 64-bit support.
Project X is the one that particularly grabs my attention. Cross-platform Delphi has been tried before, with Kylix, Delphi for Linux. Although promising, Kylix suffered on the technical side from Wine dependencies and on the marketing side from lack of demand for Delphi desktop applications. I do not have any technical information about Project X yet, but on the marketing side Mac OS X (and perhaps iPhone) is a great deal more promising than Linux.
After suffering from under-investment for many years, it is great to see Delphi now getting a new lease of life in its new home, and I’m looking forward to finding out more.
Me too Tim!
I actually bought Kylix when it came out but as mentioned I think it was ahead of the game, released at a time when linux wasn’t mainstream and not enough of a market to make it commercially viable for a developer to produce and sell apps to.
I’m excited by this prospect of x-platform especially bringing in OS X but I wonder how they will handle the GUI on each platform. The problem with a cross platform widget set is that it is often limiting and looks out of place on every platform it runs on. Will it have cocoa on os x, gnome on linux and native windows controls for win32? we’ll have to wait and see!