Categories
News

Questions for Nick Hodges

I need your questions for an upcoming interview with Nick Hodges, the Delphi & RAD Studio R&D Manager with Embarcadero Technologies. Leave them as a comment to this message and then listen to his answers in our next episode.

Comments closed in preparation for interview.  Thanks to all who commented!

22 replies on “Questions for Nick Hodges”

With respect to the now notorious Section 3.3.1 of the iPhone 4.0 SDK, how does the decision to implement cross-platform compilation to the Mac OS X operating system currently sit with the Delphi team?

Hi Jim!
Questions for Nick:
Will you generalize the use of unit testing everywhere in Delphi, VCL, RTL, new compiler?
When can we expect the 64 bits compiler (at least beta, preview…)?
What cross compiling target will be included with next Delphi, Mac and what else…?
Will it be ready for the next DelphiLive in August?
How compatible the cross-VCL (whatever name it ends up having) will be with the current VCL as of D2010?
Will Delphi 64 bits be based on this new cross VCL or an adaptation of the current VCL32 Windows?

Thanks!

Questions:
1. Will the cross-platform VCL come with updated cross-platform versions of Indy or some equivalent internet library?
2. What degree of inter-compatibility with C++ will exist in the next version of Delphi? Will it be improved over what currently exists? For example, will I be able to compile VC++ and/or gcc compatible C++ right into my Delphi projects?
3. What is the current plan for getting Delphi into more developers’ PC’s? Is there going to be an affordable entry-point for new Delphi devs?
4. The highest versions of VS come with profiling and other tools. What equivalent tools will Delphi come with?
5. Is the help system going to finally not suck? Even in D2010 it still sucks badly.
6. Will the cross-platform VCL still support touch and gestures?
7. what support for “cloud computing” will be in the next version(s) of Delphi?
8. Will there be interoperability with web-based scripting languages like Python, etc?
9. Will support for XMPP and other IM and social networking API’s be added?
10. What type of support will be added to improve the ability to create concurrent code?

Jim, thanks for the opportunity.

Question for Nick:

Are there any plans to implement support for Model-View-Controller in the VCL?

Regards,
Mario

1. Will be there free version of Delphi for non-commercial use? or will be there new Turbo Delphi release?

2. When will you update the Roadmap.

3. Do you have any plan for better support to web development or RIA?

4. When will you start to give information about Delphi 2011?

Do you know how many Caps Lock have been disabled via your Software and what is most widely used redefinition of the caps lock key via your tool.

What are his thoughts on concurrent processing and how would he like to see Delphi tackle this task? Are there any items of this nature in the current roadmaps?

When is Embarcadero going to fix the problems in the IDE? i don’t want to pelt nick with problems (he’s a great guy) but i hurt *all* the time, *every* *day* because of IDE issues like these.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2112729/biggest-delphi-nitpicks/2113066#2113066
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2112729/biggest-delphi-nitpicks/2114000#2114000
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2112729/biggest-delphi-nitpicks/2114005#2114005
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2112729/biggest-delphi-nitpicks/2112981#2112981

Without IDE reliability, new features don’t interest me at all.

Thank you!

@Meepli: You’ve got the wrong guy. For those questions you need a preacher, not a R&D Manager.

@Mark Schez: The Embarcadero guys have answered that one pretty conclusively already. From everything I’ve seen on blog posts and forum posts, the next release (D2011/”Fulcrum”) will have an OSX compiler and maybe some support for Linux as well.

Question for Nick:
1. When we will have a multi-line string?

2. We need a better syntax for closures, like C# or Ruby syntax. Do you talk about this type of syntax evolution in Embarcadero?

3. When we will have regex support in the syntax?

4. When we will have native memory garbage collection?

It seems vlcx is being updated for the new Delphi 2011 cross compiler any hope that vcl.net will be updated for Delphi Prism. And maybe Delphi Prism will be included in Rad Studio?

Will there be Office 2010 UI elemenets (Fluent Ribbon,etc) components in the next version of Delphi? And how about a $99 standard version and a $399 Professional version?

Questions about Express Editions for Nick:
why Embarcadero canceled the Express editions? It was a nice way of binding younger developers to your products. Look at Microsoft, they gave their Visual Studio away for nothing. Also it would increase the amount of free software written in / with Delphi.
Did you plan to release them again in the future, if so, when??

Hi…

Are there any plan to migrate BOLD for Delphi >= 2009…?

Thank you,
Marc

Regarding 64bit-compiler:

* Can I expect to compile my existing 32bit-projects (especially COM-DLLs) to 64bit without changes to the source code? If not, what areas do I have to look out for? How can/should I prepare my code for this?

* Is there any chance at all I will be able to compile to 64bit before the end of the year (e.g. via a preview compiler in D2011 or by participating in a beta/field test)?

* How big exactly was the ratio of people voting for xplat over 64bit in the user survey? When evaluating that did you consider that many people are still not aware that 64bit is not only about big numbers and huge amounts of memory but also about staying able to integrate and communicate with third-party processes (think shell-extensions or Office-addins)?

Misc:

* What syntactic sugar currently present in Prism can we expect to be carried over to D2011? Nullable types? Iterators? Parallel loops? Type inference (and with it simplified closure syntax)?

* Can we expect the inclusion of a UI testing framework (such as Zombie) in the foreseeable future?

* I heard version control integration will be included in D2011. Will this be a generic interface or Subversion only?

* Will you stick to the horribly sluggish “Document Explorer” thing for displaying help? Is there any chance we will get back instant context help any time soon?

* Have you considered adding formatter support to live templates so I will no longer have to manually reformat all the stock templates whenever I install Delphi?

* What others asked already: Strategy for attracting new users, future of the Turbos, possible profiler bundling, MVC/MVP, Roadmap updates, native regexes, etc.

Hi Jim,

Here’s what I would like to ask:

Easily migrating Delphi configuration settings and third-party components/tools form one PC to another:

Scenario:
1. I install Delphi on one PC
2. Install third-party components and tools
3. Set up library paths, etc..
4. I would like to easily migrate the same configuration and files to other PC

Perhaps Delphi should require installing third party components and tools in some kind of a sandbox (virtual storage) for easy migration.

Thanks.

1. Is QT the target GUI framework for Mac development?
2. If yes, shall there be a nasty CLX wrapper around it or good JCL-like headers?
3. When Delphi will be made as portable application?

Comments are closed.