Embarcadero tools and ides, are super expensive
considering that most developer tools are either free (visual studio developer is free for individuals), or way cheaper (jetbrains)
I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following
Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive
Free-pascal is cute and probably productive, but there are way more intellectually and technically interesting options, even tcl/tk in my opinion is better intellectual and technical investment of time compare to free-pascal
Most of their target audience is stuck maintaining a legacy system developed decades ago and will happily pay the premium as long as it's cheaper than rewriting everything using a modern stack.
We're in the process of migrating off a 4+ million line Delphi application that basically runs the whole business, but it's a 10+ year project to "grind the monolith", so who knows when we'll actually be done. In the meantime, we don't have much choice but to keep paying the licensing costs...
It's not really 1 x ten year project as such, but heaps of smaller 3-6 month projects (many running in parallel) to add chunks of new functionality (as microservices) and rewrite parts of the monolith that we can cleanly cleave off.
New parts of UI that are needed don't get added to the Delphi app, but get built as web pages (using React mostly at the moment), which get launched in Chrome windows from the Delphi application.
One day our Delphi app will be an empty shell of it's former self and we can have a huge decommissioning ceremony (party!), but that day's still a long way off... :)
I remember reading that a former Borland or Embacadero CEO said that he absolutely preferred having 99 $1M customers that 1M $99 customers.
I think that enterprise-first strategy has dried up any chances for a community to exist.
We use primarily use Delphi for productivity reasons and think that unless they change their go to market approach, chances of a community reappearing are low.
Perhaps after they have already completed milking enterprise customers, they try to switch to a model of $99/year subscription-only model with a single high quality IDE product and then a community suddenly reappears.
Here's another intriguing compiler suite I came across in the past [1].
For both elements, embarcadero and freepascal the promise of easy cross compilation is the most attractive feature in my eyes.
I started programming in Turbo Pascal 20 years ago or so, but I don't know... coming back to the language these days doesn't sound like the most efficient use of my time.
Looking at their price / feature matrix, they are running this platform like it's still 1999. The cheapest option is outrageous, and has no client/server DB support. So that means spending at least $3,600 (on sale!) for a usable development platform. Batshit crazy.
You're not the market for these tools. There are loads of enterprise systems built on top of this which need development and yes, they're still bought and sold like it's 1999. A lot of enterprise systems haven't been 'disrupted' yet and as long as Embarcadero is kicking then there is still a market for them. Oh, you've got this early 2000's system written in Delphi which you need to continue supporting, way too expensive to rewrite (think of the auditing and the requirement gathering, oh my.. this is gonna take years!) and now it needs to run on the latest version of Windows because of security constraints? Yup, you pay top dollar for that.
The existing "market" for this are enterprises who are stuck with Delphi for legacy reasons. As far as I can tell no new projects are starting with Delphi - which means it is only a matter of time when Delphi as a platform is relegated to history.
Embarcadero/Inprise/Idera or whatever they are calling themselves these days have zero vision.
It does seem strange in this day of cloud databases and connected everything, to differentiate their "Enterprise" product based on local vs remote databases[1]. A very outdated way to do things. I think Delphi has had that model since the 90s. On the other hand, they now have a Community edition that is free until your company reaches $5k in revenue.
It is even more strange given the fact that the value of the database support is in the MVC-ish TDataSet/TDataSource/TDBWhatever framework which obviously comes even with the local edition and not in the database drivers, which truly suck and have better opensource replacements (and in reasonably large application get rewritten from scratch anyway)
It is expensive, but you're being overly critical I think. There are a lot of paid tools in the $1500 - $5000 range just for a single user and some cost even more for deployment. If it had cost $10k I would call it insane, but $3,600 isn't too crazy.
That's for the Enterprise edition, which is very rarely needed outside of very large projects that will normally have a budget for it.
Even with a Pro it's also not just VS itself, but a bunch of other MS products. The exact list depends on how you arrive at getting a subscription, but if you are to take the BizSpark (?) route, it will get you Windows, Windows Server, Office licenses and a handful of Azure credits.
Few years ago they obviously realized this and created free of charge "community" edition (IIRC it is licensed in the "it's free unless you make more than X with this" way, like Unreal Engine).
The target customers for the paid editions obviously are developers of custom line of bussines applications. And in that case the license cost is somewhat justified, as the IDE and it's libraries are essentially directly usable for that, while everyone developing similar things in notionally free of charge Visual Studio is going to buy DevExpress and ReSharper.
"If you're a small company or organization without revenue (or up to $5,000 per year in revenue), you can also use the Delphi Community Edition. Once your company's total revenue reaches US $5,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, you can move up to an unrestricted commercial license with Professional edition."
Most Delphi software I've seen was more a replacement for Clipper than IBM/Oracle-grade Fortune 500 stuff. One step above Access. Heck, it seems to have kept Firebird alive.
And in turn, you get a lot of job offers rewriting Delphi software in C#.
I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following
Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive
Free-pascal is cute and probably productive, but there are way more intellectually and technically interesting options, even tcl/tk in my opinion is better intellectual and technical investment of time compare to free-pascal