Embarcadero have a really nice thing going here. People have a codebase stuck on their product, and EMBT can do (or not do) pretty much whatever they want, and people are going to renew theyr crap, I’m afraid there’s only one way that’s ever gonna change: when good people like you stop throwing good money after bad. :(.
My recommendation for anyone who is stuck on legacy Delphi code: draw a line in the sand, and say, “until here and no further”. standardize on whatever version of Delphi you already own, and keep maintaining your projects with that. And ditch Delphi, for future projects. (and i don’t care whether you ditch it for Oxygene, or for something from a different vendor. What matters is that EMBT doesn’t keep raking in revenue without providing value — it’s the only way the can change and learn, and will stop milking that cow).
it’s unlikely to happen, from either side. To start with, why would EMBT ever part with said golden cow, until it’s truly wrought dry? and if they did, i’m sure they’d not want to sell to us. They hate us and what re represent: a challenge to the fact that “Embarcadero own Pascal” (that’s a quote).
On our side, i don’t believe we’d be interested in buying it from them, even if offered. For one, EMBT is not a company i’d ever want to do business again. been there, done there, got fucked and did not even get a Tee-Shirt. For another, Delphi is stone-age technology, and i dread to think what would be involved in maintaining it, let alone bringing it forward into the 21st century. There’s probably very sound technical reasons why EMBT isn’t moving the language forward at anything but a glacial pace — and why former compiler engineer Danny Thorpe was literally afraid to touch the compiler, for the decade or so that he was in charge of it. It must be one crappy codebase.
We do have grand(er) plans for Pascal (and C#), and they include what EMBT calls “true native” development — that is, building CPU-native code without the .NET runtime — but we’ll approach them from our end, with the two great languages we already have. (and that’s really all i can say, unless i want Carlo to send out the hit squad ;).
Delphi would not have a good home here with us. But i agree it would deserve, and could flourish, at least for Windows/VCL development, at a company different than EMBT that really was invested in and loved the product — not just its milk.
That’s freaking scary. My heart goes out to those poor misled souls.
Or, take over the “spanish soup kitchen”.