[lazarus] Kylix article on slashdot

[michael at tfdec1.fys.kuleuven.ac.be]

On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Michael A. Hess wrote:

> Cliff Baeseman wrote:
> > 
> > There si a article that was just posted on slashdot about Kylix. The
> > article has a link to the article on borlands site about the internals
> > of kylix.
> 
> It is interesting but you really need to read between the lines. This is
> the first paragraph and the last sentence tells a tale.
> 
>     "This is the first in a series of Borland community articles
>      intended to brief you, the Delphi and C++Builder developer, on
>      Kylix technical bits that you need to be aware of to prepare
>      yourself and your code for possible porting or migration to the
>      Linux universe. This is a briefing of directions, issues, and
>      solutions currently under evaluation, not a technical
>      specification cast in stone."
> 
> This was a report of items "...currently under evaluation,..". Exactly
> how far away are they from even having a compiler available for Linux?
> 
> The next sentence that really gets me is:
> 
>     "I'm not going to talk about VCL, or the IDE, or anything
>      else. You'll just have to keep an eye on the Borland
>      community site headlines to catch articles on those
>      topics later on."
> 
> The VCL and IDE are what Delphi and C++ Builder are all about. This
> almost sounds like hype to keep everyone interested but really says that
> they are far far far from releasing anything.

Not so, they organize(d) a meeting for Component developers. I don't think
they would do that unless they have something to say/show.

The manager of the Delphi team (Mr. Nadler) told me that they would be 
happy to have a working compiler and RTL for the first release; while 
I think such a statement is more intended as a brake on the enthousiasm 
of the marketing department, I think there is an element of truth in it 
anyway.

The VCL is very windows oriented, no matter what everyone says. Quickreport 
depends on it; most of the database stuff depends on the BDE, which is also
very windows oriented (it is said to contain still old 16 bit code, but I
don't know if that is true). I don't even mention COM and OLE automation,
which is exclusive Windows territory.

I don't know about the IDE itself, but its need for the windows registry is
also obvious, the debugger support is entirely based on the Windows debug
API.. What more do you need ?

Taking out DB support, COM&OLE and Quickreport, you loose a lot ! 
On the other hand, Midas is quite platform independent, and you can 
get a long way with that...

I would be very pleased to see Kylix sport a modest number of working
components (Standard, DB and Internet). That should definitely be 
within the grasp of the Delphi team.
After all, a team that puts together Delphi, can't be bad :-)

One day we should be able to say the same about Lazarus :-)

Michael.