Marco Tech Blog

April 2, 2012

RAD Studio 2012 Survey

Embarcadero has an active RAD Studio Survey, worth taking to suggest your ideas...

posted by marcocantu @ 3:57PM | 18 Comments [0 Pending]

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

 I think Delphi has get the "venerable language" 
qualifier. Almost 20 years and a Pascal base is a lot of 
time. Modern language features are really a must have. I 
guess a sort of garbage collector / reference counting 
will be great improvements. Of course, I post the 
survey!

Comment by Tiago Ameller on April 2, 16:58

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

Where's the Delphi survey? We stopped buying RAD 
Studio when it was clear that C++ Builder could not 
compete with VC++ any longer (especially low level 
development like drivers).

Comment by Luigi D. Sandon on April 2, 18:23

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

If they ever implement garbage collection, that will be 
the day that I will freeze my development to Delhi XE/2, 
and not update ever again!!!!!!!!!! 

Comment by Mihaela [http://mihaelamj.com] on April 2, 20:54

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

I had employees who had this survey sent to them, but I 
was not.  The prior survey was linked to a specific 
email address, I searched high and low for it and this 
the first link that worked.

Thank you!   

I wonder what happened and why I was excluded.

Comment by Robert Love [] on April 3, 00:10

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

Garbage Collection in every case should be possible to
be switched of, VERY important.
If we are compelled to use garbage collection then
this would diminish the value of the package
significantly - 

!!! we wish maximum control!!! 
not at last to have the opportunity to circumvent bugs!!!!

would be a really big stupidity to force the developer
into garbage collection without alternative.

Comment by Baker on April 3, 07:27

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

addendum:

-pointers MUST be available
-i NEED fixed size arrays 

sounds a lot like efforts to transform into a children
language, WHY???
 

Comment by Baker on April 3, 07:30

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

A garbage collector can be optional, see Barry Kelly.

http://codecentral.embarcadero.com/Item/21646

I would like some attention to be paid to the IDE.

Comment by Kollander on April 3, 07:37

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

If I would need garbage collection, I would use .Net.
They should spend there time for more important
things, e.g. to write code faster and saver (compiler
checks), and of course bug fixes!
I am sure, if they would implement garbage collection,
you have to skip that release and maybe the next,
because of too much introduced bugs and side effects.
As we can see from the past.

Comment by Markus J. on April 3, 07:52

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

It's a pity this question came without any 
explanation. Things like "no pointers", "0 based 
strings" and "dynamic arrays only" seem to break 
virtually all existing Delphi code including the 
RTL/VCL/FMX. The Delphi team obviously knows that, so 
they must have a good idea to solve this problem. But 
nobody knows what they have in mind, all we can do is 
answer "don't care" or "will buy this right away" to 
questions we don't understand.

Comment by Giel on April 3, 10:13

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

Why we all need a new version of Delphi language, as it 
is capable of doing almost anything, and capable of acquiring new features.(most of the problems are only 
quality issues)

To attract new devs, they have to make a new language 
(instead of doing surgeries to good old delphi ) may be 
based on C language and having Object oriented and other features and libraries of Delphi.(something similar to 
c#)

Comment by VRV on April 4, 04:16

Android and Windows Metro! 

Native targeting to Android and Windows 8 Metro are my
absolute must have features for Delphi XE3!

It would be great to have one source with special GUIs
for Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and Metro.

Comment by Delphianer on April 4, 09:45

RAD Studio 2012 Survey is already closed.... 

The link today (April 4th) now points to a closed 
survey. I really wonder how the survey was managed 
and why. Looks another bad PR move from Embarcadero, 
a semi-secret survey sent only to some customers 
(without asking them to keep it private, it looks), 
and not to others. Second bad move after a silly beta 
(and the dreadful state of FireMonkey and the lame 
attempts to fix it shows why it was wrong).
My disgust for BorCodeDero grows bigger and bigger...

Comment by Luigi D. Sandon on April 4, 21:30

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

Luigi,

> The link today (April 4th) now points to a closed 
survey. 

It was supposed to close end of March and it was 
announced with an email to registered Delphi 
developers, don't know which group. It has hundreds of 
participants, was certainly not a closed survey as you 
claim.

> Second bad move after a silly beta 
(and the dreadful state of FireMonkey and the lame 
attempts to fix it shows why it was wrong).

This is helpless. Which silly beta? What dreadful 
state of FireMonkey? I think the library has a great 
architecture, with the issues any new library has...

> My disgust for BorCodeDero grows bigger and 
bigger...

And you cannot refrain to keep repeating you disagree 
with just about everything they do and its opposite? 
<g>

-Marco

Comment by Marco Cantu [http://www.marcocantu.com] on April 4, 21:40

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

- Garbage Collection
- No pointers
- Immutable Strings
- 0 based strings
- Dynamic arrays only
- Rooted Type System

Please NO! We already have Delphi for .NET. Why we want 
a second one?

And please don't touch strings anymore! They already 
work slower thanks to the built-in code page. Nobody 
uses different ANSI code pages in an application at the 
same time.

Comment by Kryvich [http://sites.google.com/site/kryvich/] on April 6, 09:01

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

Of course, it would be nice if I could use Delphi to
write Apps for android devices. But to be honest,
there are already so many new things in the Delphi
Xe2, that it is not urgent at least for me. Since the
fourth update of the RAD and the first update for the
TeeChart component, I am quite happy with this release
of Delphi, that exceed by far my expectation.

I could be nice to add a good and well documented
parser out of the box in Delphi for C and objective-C
header files. It is a feature that is not difficult to
implement and that is really missing since Delphi 1

-Alex

Comment by Alexandre Jacquot on April 7, 23:07

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

Sigh...
Why do they want to rape Delphi?

It's such a beautiful and nice girl,
some of those "improvements" would be
like cutting all of her hair and then
segregate her for life.

It's just wrong.

A 

Comment by Andrea Raimondi on April 9, 17:11

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

What about improving smart linking (so binary size can be reduced)? It's 
quite nasty that an empty form app is about a megabyte with recent 
Delphis. There's a reason why I still use Delphi 3 and 4 at times.

Comment by Max [http://www.fischerinsel.org] on May 5, 18:47

RAD Studio 2012 Survey 

I use Fortran 95/03 for serious physics
number-crunching work. For compiler efficiency please
keep fixed-size arrays and pointers with the
protection from misuse that modern Fortran provides.
Please consider at least some of the simpler
Matlab-like array syntax.  Use of Pascal's ".." rather
than ":" would not be a problem for me.
I've had serious issues with C++ because of invisible
memory allocation issues.  Garbage collection should
be optional as Baker (above) suggests.
An f95 dialect (extension) of Free Pascal would be
fabulous.  Especially if calls to Ancient Fortran were
supported - making that vast scientific legacy usable.

Comment by Leonard Bradfield [lhwb@golden.net] on May 27, 23:39