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Borland Linux Poll: Take Two 67

Posted by Hemos from the let's-try-and-not-crash-this-time dept.
A fair number of you probably voted in the recent poll about Borland exploring Linux development. As the other article touched on, they are looking to hire people, and are running a poll to test the waters. However, the prior poll's server got slashdotted, and they missed a lot of people's comments. If you didn't make it at first, head over again and make your voice heard.
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Borland Linux Poll: Take Two More

Borland Linux Poll: Take Two

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  • The fact that their server got slashdotted should tell them something about the demand. Heres to C++ Builder and Delphi on Linux!
  • Actually, they want everyone to come over and vote again, they're not combining the 2 polls results (at least, according to the e-mail seen on Linux Today).
  • I received a cold call from somebody at Inprise
    (and why are we still trying to call it borland?)

    She seemed rather perplexed and annoyed that I
    was only interested in products for Linux and Digital Unix, and was very not interested in talking about anything else. Could I have had
    an effect?
  • I answered, "Open Source Makes no difference to me" on the questions about the importance of GPL. I hope they port their products and sell them and make money on the Linux platform. There are a lot of programmers out there like me that don't care about GPL or "Free" software, but use it because its a cool environment and it provides a level playing field that isn't inundated and overwhelmingly dominated by Microsoft.
  • In my personal view, GPL is only critical in the OS and LGPL in the important librarys. I have no problems with closed apps. I'd prefer GPLed ones, but it isn't nearly as important.
  • I really do NEED open source because I am as poor as a church mouse. Basically I don't have the spare cash to waste my money on some compiler that will just be upgraded to a later version and become useless for anything later. I found out this the hard way trying to compile some source code package and finding out that Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 was totally impotent to do anything for me.
  • ...some rational people are voting, too.

    How do you think the playing field got so level, if not for Free Software?

    ---
    Put Hemos through English 101!
  • Malda is suddenly quotable? Interesting?!
    The only reason I can have such a good site is that you basically have to own a t-1 and a mega box to create a site like slashdot. If I ever got access like that I would do my damndest to get something nice up. But price hamstrings me all the way.
  • You know, "Open Source" and "Making money" are not mutually exclusive.
  • How many millions and millions of resumes do companies who so much as imply the tiniest, slightest, smallest, miniscule chance of a job opening get hit with when they appear on Slashdot? Or is it billions of resumes. You could see Borland's mail server explode from 3000 miles away.
  • Hey I want to get tech related telemarketing from anyone instead of the standard boring stuff.
  • How would it explode isn't there a bandwidth limitation. That should keep the box from exploding verry easily.
  • Absolutely... That is why the OS and important libaries should be open source. If one company controls them then they have an unfair advantage. In Microsofts case, they've abused the advantage mercilessly. Proprietary undocumented file formats, api calls etc, etc... Companies like Borland should be JUMPING all over linux. They will be able to compete on strong technology rather than what microsoft chooses to "Allow" them to know. Open source created the playing field, now lets watch software companies play on it... or go to bat ourselves :)
  • At this rate, it isn't going to take long for companies to realize that hiring Linux developers is easy, and people will buy your product in hordes. If Borland plays their cards right, they could very well end up with an incredible market share rebound.
    ------------------------------
  • Who has that market share now Micro$oft?
  • 1. Didn't /. run a story about how Borland was getting rid of OWL and become another MFC compiler? Doesn't that mean that Borland/Inprise is going in too many directions at once? As much as I want Delphi and Jbuilder, I want it to be *quality*. I don't want the port to suffer because too many of the staff were diddling with MFC garbage.
    2. The IDE must let me use whatever editor I want. Once the rest of the world realizes this their products will sell (in the Linux sphere). Likewise, the compiler suite must mesh with whatever I have, ie useful command line tools.
    3. It must work out of the box, and not be crippled of useful functionality. Right now most Windows IDE's are slanted toward Windows functionality, obviously. If all I got was a toolbar and some graphics libraries, well, no thank you. I want things on that CD that will do for me, a Linux developer, what MFC does for the Windows guys.
    Wait. Maybe I should rephrase that.
    I want it to really improve on the coding, I want it to really do some of the work for me, I want it to help me develop better software. Thats a tall order as I see it.
  • I used to use Turbo C to write DOS apps all the time. It was quick and had a spiffy IDE. Of course, that's the only Borland product I've ever used, I dunno if they still make 'em like that.

    If they decide to do anything in the Turbo C range (i.e. cheap, but it does what I want it to) for Linux, I'll certainly buy a copy.
  • I remember TC++ as a quick way to learn and produce useful programs. It was lean and did the job quite well. There was something about the environment that just made it great to start with. It had everything there within reach of menus, from examples, help, debugging, watching variables, compiling, editing, etc.

    My mistake was sometime after that I wanted to write something with a graphical interface and fell for the Visual C++ from Microsoft. Having purchased Microsoft C since the 5.0 verson, I thought it would be just as productive. Wrong. Somehow VC++ 1.0 caused my brain to rot. A few years of this torment and fustration of being unproductive and then I discovered Linux. It was with great joy that this free software encouraged me to think of my computer as hardware that can be programmed to my desire. I now have control over my computer once again...

    If Borland came out with a design environment that was even half as good as Turbo C++, I'd certainly check it out. TC++ was inspiring and worked for me. It would be great if the can extend that legend to Linux.
  • They have re-renamed the development division back to Borland. In honor of the great Al Borland of Home Improvement. (Well, maybe not that last part :) )
  • I still have a copy of TC++ 2.0 on my hard drive. I haven't used it in a while, but if I ever want to code up a quick-and-dirty DOS utility, there is no better way IMHO.

  • $125M no strings attached (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The $125M that Inprise got from Microsoft (plus patent cross-licensing agreement) was completely no strings attached. Inprise was close to going under, but they had a last trick up their sleeve, a software patent for GUI builders.

    The patent covers automagically being able to work with the gui designer view or the source code view and having the changes be reflected immediately in the other view.

    It doesn't matter what you think about software patents, what matters is that MS Visual C++ and Visual Basic were in violation of the patent. Instead of fighting it out in the courts, MS just paid out, what for them was a trivial sum.

    So, yes Inprise got a bunch of money from Microsoft, but it is so completely strings-free that we needn't worry about it having any impact on Borland tools for Linux.
  • I've been a Delphi user since the 1.0 version. However, all of my development work is now in Linux. I've had difficulty adjusting to building GUI applications on this newer (and much better) OS.

    I've noticed the comments many people have made about ObjectPascal as a language. Pascal, and particularly Borland's implementation in Delphi, leaves a lot to be desired from an OO perspective. I suggest that Borland take another fork in the road a bit and develop an IDE that has Python as its underlying language. Admittedly, Python is a scripting language, but is is running very well on Linux and Windows. Furthermore, using Python would relieve Borland of porting ObjectPascal immediately. Moreover, Python is easy to learn and it works well in both Linux and Windows -- making the transition phase from Windows to Linux that much easier.

    I also suggest that the things that most novice and "corporate power users" liked about Delphi was that the IDE relieved the developer from a lot of tedious overhead issues that are necessary for making programs run. All Borland needs to do is apply their tried and true formula (i.e., making it easy to write good programs quickly) and simply port that over to Linux. No matter what language they use, if Borland puts a familiar façade in front of all those Windows developers, hide the gory details (heresy, I know) and make that functionality work in Linux, Borland will make money and the Linux world will be better for it.

    Simply creating an IDE for python would be less work than porting ObjectPascal (with all of its concessions to the Windows OS). Thus, Borland could make its corporate splash onto the Linux scene quickly and take the pressure off of getting a quick Delphi port out the door. Hopefully, Borland would take the opportunity to clean up ObjectPascal and make it a truly object oriented language (particularly in the area of object collections, TCollection sucks).
  • Hey, maybe I just don't understand....

    What would it take to make an Open IDE, with pluggable compilers? Then, pick your editor, pick your language and pick your source code control. I program in multiple languages and this would make life a whole lot easier!

    Hey, if this already exists, someone please let me know where I can get it.
  • RHIDE is also available for Linux!
    I found a URL for y'all:
    http://www.tu-chemnit z.de/~sho/rho/rhide-1.4/rhide-linux.html [tu-chemnitz.de]
    I think it's one of those apps that's in a perpetual beta stage [kinda like ICQ for winbloze...]
    I used RHIDE it when I was still looking through Windows. I was happy when I discovered I could use it in the Open [source that is]. It came with my commercial copy of the SuSE[5.3 or 6.0 or 6.1- I canna remember] distro...
    HTH,
    Steelehead
  • I've used Borland's stuff since the early days
    of Turbo Pascal for CPM/80 and I've always had
    great support from them. Borland C++ 3.1 or 3.0
    are still very valuable tools for embedded
    environment. I used it for the V25 and V35
    and plan on using it for the 80C186 series.
    Coupled with Borland's remote debugger this is
    a fantastic tool. It is not because that you
    were impotent that it should have affected the
    rest of us. I bailed out after Borland abandonned
    OS/2.
  • I learned C/C++ with the beautiful TC 3.0 environment. People look at the colors I set up in other editors like I'm daft. I'm not daft, I just envision all syntax highliting as being the way it was in that editor. Easy to read, colors contrasted well. As far as where they've gone in the future, A while a go (back in the closing days of win 3.1), I used Borland C++ 4.51, which was a windows version of their IDE. It felt and behaved the same way good old TC did, it just ran in windows. I didn't have to relearn any hotkeys, didn't have to fix the colors. It had a **GREAT** debugger (makes all other debuggers I've ever seen look like utter crap). It didn't do well with 32-bit environments, though, and so I had to ditch it. I struggled on with it for a little while, after I tried to use VC++ (poor old 1.0 which was really a pile of diarhea) and was horrified. Seeing VC 1 was enough to convince myself that I could work with BC++ until I found something better. Then Borland didn't put out new versions for a while. Then BC 5 was horribly buggy. Then VisualStudio came out, and Borland was left in the dust. Sadly, OWL more or less went with it. One code wizard I talked to made the point that, from his expertise, OWL was definitely superior to MFC (or at least what MFC was at that point), but Borland's failure to deliver product updates and bugfixes caused many customers to switch over to Visual Studio, and things have never been the same since. Now, after long last, I have made friends with gcc and make, but it isn't the same. I would love to have an IDE that actually worked. There's a handful of half-functional ones around now, but nothing that I would want to use on a daily basis. At this point, I have done more linux software development using UltraEdit on a windows box editing files over FTP, with a telnet session open to run make, and another one to debug in (command line debuggers are the bane of a programmer's work, gdb is no exception).

    Anyways, if Borland/Inprise came out with a really spiffy IDE for linux, I would probably make it one of the only pieces of software I've actually bought (other notables have been my RedHat cds and a copy of Matlab (I didn't buy it myself, but it was paid for legitimately)).
  • Same here, pretty much. I learned C using the DOS based Borland C/C++ 3.1.

    One very nice feature that it had (if I recall correctly) was smart syntax highlighting. For example: If I have a #define and I use it later, I want to be able to see by its color that it is a #define, not just another variable. Another example would be having all function names (regardless of location) be the same color. Does anyone know of any free/open source editors that can do something like that? Everything I have seen so far just seems to be based on glorified regular expressions. -John

  • Or do it for Perl too...
    --
  • Whaddya know, that's when I bailed out, too.

    I held off as long as I could, but Microsoft (sadly) seems to have won the development tool war on Windows. It makes me sad because Turbo C was the first piece of PC software I ever bought.
  • Try XWPE. Looks much like Borlands old TC++ 3.x to me.
  • I use JBuilder 3 (Enterprise or Client-Server) at work and for a $2.5 grand product there are an awful lot of bugs, including some that are just plain lazy and sloppy programming (remember Borland C++ 5???). Even Micro$oft manages to start making their software useable by version 3 (I'm sure that the useable J++ would be more popular if it just stuck to the Java spec). JBuilder drives me insane... thank goodness for Emacs! Before porting to Linux, may I suggest fixing the bugs before introducing tonnes more.

    On a side-note, isn't JBuilder partly implemented in Java... wouldn't that make porting easier?
  • Borland is obsolete. Their C compiler was used initially because that's what Minix was compiled with. But that lasted only until Linux was good enough to support a real compiler.
  • I would like to see some comments as to why Delphi should be ported to Linux. Is the thinking that Delphi makes devloping apps easier/faster. Therefore, more/better apps for Linux will result from a Linux Delphi?
  • Two problems. The CGI for the first poll was written without any kind of real traffic in mind. It did a lot of unnecessary DB processing to generate the HTML and also did some post processing of the survey submissions. It basically was not efficient at all. It worked fine if only a couple of people were using it at a time, but throw a few hundred at it at once and things got pretty messy. Over the weekend it was rewritten to be an order of magnitude more efficient.

    Second, the hardware it was running on was sort of a "multipurpose" server that gets used for miscellaneous projects. It was not part of the official I.S. system. The server happened to be running about 70 other processes for others as well. - no elbow room

    We ended up getting new hardware and fixing the survey software, but in the mean time we had rehosted the survey with, Infopoll, an outside company that specializes in web surveys to keep the survey running. It was working well so we stayed with Infopoll rather than switch back to our original "now-working properly" system.

    That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

    -Michael

  • Re:Demand (Score:1)

    by mce ( 509 )
    Not really. They got slashdotted simply because they made the headlines on slashdot and every other slashdotter and his/her dog headed over there just to have a look, whether actually interested or not. Multiple times actually, since they weren't getting through.

    The things that Borland want to know, are:

    • what is it that they should build;
    • for whom;
    • can they make money out of it?

    Those are very valid questions that go beyond the mere fact that lots of people visit the poll. There already is something like gcc, after all, which is free (like in speech and beer) and definitely good enough (maybe not to some people, but to most).

    --


  • I don't mind a closed source compiler if all of the libs are open sourced - and as far as cost goes I'd be happy to pay for a personal license up to about £150 ($225)

    Tom
  • >become another MFC compiler?

    Delphi and CBuilder have always supported MFC but the main framework is their VCL. What that last story meant was that borland products will support the most up to date MFC. In the past the MFC supplied hasn`t always been current so MS products appeared better.

    >2. The IDE must let me use whatever editor I want

    I think this is unlikely as their are a number of fetures that integrate the editor and the forms, for example you click on a menu item on a form the ide takes you to the relevent place in the code, I can`t see how they could implement this with a third party editor.

  • There are a lot of programmers out there like me that don't care about GPL or "Free" software, but use it because its a cool environment and it provides a level playing field that isn't inundated and overwhelmingly dominated by Microsoft.

    Umm... yes, it is a level playing field. But have you ever stopped to think why it is so? Could it possibly be because of GPL and other free software licenses? If people don't care about freedom, how long will it stay that way?

    And anyway, writing Open Source software doesn't exclude the possibility of making money. I know many people who are doing it as their job.

    (and check out SourceXchange [sourcexchange.com] for another way to make money with Open Source).

    /Bergie

    --

  • I want things on that CD that will do for me, a Linux developer, what MFC does for the Windows guys.

    there are APIs like that now. GTK and Qt are two good examples. If you really want to see a cool application framework, check out the BeOS API online [be.com]. It's very very sweet.

  • I think a closed source compiler is fine, provided it is 100% source compatible with gcc. Ie, you write a program in bcc for linux, then release the source, i can now download it and compile it in gcc. Maybe it won't run quite so fast, but it will still run. What use is a GPL'd program if you need a proprietary compiler to compile it?
  • I used to use Borland's tools before they became unusable. They were the best tools at the time, but when Microsoft started to make theirs usable, Borland started to release versions too early. Borland C++ 4.0 couldn't generate usable binaries, even after the patches (4.2) it wasn't reliable. Version 5, I didn't even try it because of the bad comments I've heard.

    I think this is a chance for Inprise to do 'The Right Thing'. They shall not have any competition so there is no rush (at first), they can take some time (not too much) to make some good first versions. That would buy them some air to take the time to fix those old bugs in all the other packages they have (even those win32 ugly things).


    Kierkan
  • I bought at the time Borland C++ 3.10 with Application Frameworks even though its cost was $500. These are two and a half my monthly salaries now. This was in fact almost the only software that I ever bought. You can quite easily guess why.

    The coolest thing in it, apart from the fact that I had printed documentation, was that its libraries were available in source. I am a self-made programmer, and not only that but I also never had a chance to work with people from which to learn and this was my first encounter with professionally written source code. I'll never forget those days.

    Let's forget the price now. I wouldn't buy their software again because with Linux I have access even to the compiler's source code (thanks to GNU of course). I like companies like Borland and Corel and I wish them luck in beating the Redmond giant but their chances are slim. I believe that the days of mass appeal proprietary software are numbered. One exception of course is games. No matter how many free games there are, the demand for more won't decrease. They are like books or movies: the good ones only increase the appetite for more.
  • Agreed.

    But there aleady is some competition appearing in the Linux/Java market: Metrowerks has ported Codewarrior and IBM has released a preview port of VisualAge Java.

    I heard that JBuilder was slated for later in the year after their Solaris port??????
  • I'd also like to see the function call generation stuff opened up. Would allow me to, say, use Borland C/C++ to write programs for my newest whizbang OS on the x86 platform, which uses a new methodology for function calls, builds the stack differently, etc.

    If that could be made modular, and the compiler provided hooks or something like that to produce binary output in whatever form I wanted it, then I could really get behind a product like Borland's. If not, I'll only be able to use it for Linsux development, and that would severely limit its usefulness to me.

    --Corey
  • People complain that Micro$oft release closed software. Few recognise the fact that they too release the source code to many of their libraries. Visual C++ allows you to install the source code to MFC, ATL (of course! It's templates) and the CRT stuff.
  • You are right, here's a thought.

    Wouldn't be a kicker if Inprise/Borland uses the money from MS to finance their Linux development?:).
  • I hope they do port Delphi and C++ Builder over. But lets not forget one very important point.

    Aside from JBuilder, Delphi and Borland C++ are Intel only compilers. If they are going to port to Linux they should port to the other prevailing CPU architectures (Alpha and PowerPC). Because of their limited finances they may not. If they don't port, at best they are offering only a partial solution. (Or not one at all).

    On the other hand....They may if someone from Compaq and Motorola is paying attention and is willing to finance the project.

    For those of you who are excited about Borland tools on Linux, add the request to port to other CPU's in any available comment fields in the poll.

  • You keep bitching about VC but maybe the problem is on your side. It seems like there are thousands of people who somehow manage to develop quite powerful apps using this enviroment. Think about that...
  • Snoochie Bootchie writes:

    "I would like to see some comments as to why Delphi should be ported to Linux."

    OK: Because it's so damn good, I *want* it! :-)


    "Is the thinking that Delphi makes devloping apps easier/faster."

    In a word: YES!!!


    "Therefore, more/better apps for Linux will result from a Linux Delphi?"

    And companies will be *able* (or at least, "less un-able") to migrate from Windows to Linux -- companies like the one where I work, companies with in-house applications developed in Delphi.

    That's almost the main benefit, as I see it.


    Christian R. Conrad
    MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.

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