Steve Teixeira, well know in the Delphi community for his books and his Delphi-related work, is now Group Program Manager for Visual C++. In his latest blog post, he addresses the problem of efficiency vs. UI frameworks. This originates from a video in which he introduces the idea of an interoperability layer to C++ developer replace MFC with WinForms, while keeping their core code in native C++. Interesting post. I have to say the he misses one of the efficiency points, as .NET applications with a UI slow down because of the marshalling and protection of the Win32 API calls, not because of the nature of IL.
However, that's not the main issue. In seeing the struggle of Microsoft to move everyone to .NET, of the developers to keep their code efficient, and of trouble in rewriting large portions of an applications (migrating MFC UI code to WinForms is a total rewrite), I'm reminded of how nice a solution we (in the Delphi camp) have at our hands with the ability of moving VCL code to VCL.NET almost seamlessly (OK, OK, I know there is a lack of third party components...) and even having a single source that targets both the native and the managed platform.
I think Delphi developers, in this respect, are in a much better position of the C++/MFC developers, even if (or because of?) they have a large company as Microsoft behind their tool. Can we say, "Delphi rocks"?