Hands on: The latest Delphi software

Codegear has released two new versions of Delphi – Delphi 2007 for Windows, and Delphi for PHP, which aims to bring Delphi Rad to PHP web programming.

Delphi 2007 compiles to native Win32 code only, omitting the .Net compilation found in Delphi 2005 and 2007, though the IDE itself still requires the .Net runtime.

Codegear says it is not giving up on .Net, and will release a new .Net edition at a future date, but the move reflects the tendency of Delphi developers to prefer native code.

It is difficult for Codegear to compete with C# and Visual Basic in the .Net world.

Why Delphi?
With .Net now well established, why do developers still like native code? There are three main reasons. The first is performance. Here’s a quick example: a basic Delphi form application with a listbox and a couple of buttons shows the following memory usage in Task Manager on Vista:

Working set: 6,752K

Private bytes: 1,136K

An application with the same features measures as follows in Visual Basic .Net:

Working set: 16,952K

Private bytes: 4,312K

Memory usage is a slippery thing to measure. The working set is the actual memory in use, but may include memory shared by other processes, while memory in Private Bytes cannot be shared. On today’s machines with huge reserves of Ram this hunger for memory may not be critical. Even so, there are implications for how well the application will run on older machines, how fast it will load, and how many simultaneous applications will run.

The second reason is deployment.

If you stick to basic controls, a Delphi application has few if any dependencies, whereas .Net applications require a large runtime to be present.

The third reason is flexibility. The .Net Framework does not wrap the entire Windows API. Although almost anything can be achieved via Pinvoke (Platform invocation), this is an extra and error-prone step for when you need those unwrapped APIs. By contrast, Delphi can handle the Windows API easily.

Delphi is not the only option for native-code Windows development. Microsoft’s offering is Visual C++. The beauty of Delphi is that it is close to Visual Basic for productivity and close to C or C++ for performance.