some reflections on #Delphi #FireMonkey support for #iOS based on the #FPC compiler that caused quite a surprise

When looking over a few forums, it seems that the way Delphi XE2 will support FireMonkey on iOS (by using FPC aka the FreePascal Compiler) was very surprising, even for the FPC dev team.

Actually, Embarcadero’s Michael Swindell posted some very interesting reactions on the Lazarus forum and his series of comments on Jon Lennart Aasenden blog entry discussing Delphi XE2 and iOS.

Recommended reading!

A lot of pieces of the puzzle fall into place now: Embarcadero aquiring KSDev (that made DXScene/VXScene), and the support in FPC 2.5.1 for a more Delphi Language compatible syntax, and Objective Pascal binding to Objective C as indicated by Phil Hess. VGScene already supported iOS using FPC in Delphi Mode, as this thread on the embarcadero forums also indicates, so it is logical that FireMonkey does too.

Embarcadero, FreePascal and RemObjects are in parallel (and sometimes cooperation) working on cross platform compiler development.
For the Mobile world, ARM (for iOS) and Java (Android, BlackBerry) are very important.

Clearly, Borland was far ahead of its time when they demonstrated their dcc32j Delphi to Java bytecode compiler proof of concept at BorCon conferences back when their opening evenents had great videos (I think it was both at BorCon 1998 and BorCon 1997), and not so great shifts (the Inprise identity crisis).

The same holds for the Sun’s slogan “the network is the computer” (actually by John Gage): basically that was about predecessors of Cloud computing.

Things from the past come back, sometimes presented as “new”, a few (partially from this Evolution of Pascal programmers.stackexchange.com thread):

• The p-code and Smalltalk virtual machine just in time compilation from the 70s and 80s  systems were far ahead of the Java VM from the 90s and .NET CLR from early this century.
  The fun is that p-code already had support for multiple languages, which Java bytecode didn’t have at first, and .NET CLR had from the beginning.
  And I love the “A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages” description of novelty for Java and C# :)
• XML being a text based key value system (or even INI or CSV files) on steroids
• WebServices being a form of stateless CORBA without many bells and whistles (that later got re-added because businesses do need bells and whistles)
• Apps on mobile devices being a reincarnation of client-server model systems
• The 1970s SCCM layered by the 1990s TeamWare and BitKeeper are great distributed revision control systems, for ahead of current distributed revision control systems
  (it is fun to see that RemObjects now uses git)

All of those are (partial repetitions) of technologies that help you build systems. The trick is how to be able to quickly learn and apply those technologies (as opposed to add a bunch of TLAs or FLABs wich are about the only thing that most modern “recruiters” use to match résumés/CVs to positions).

Some of the things above have died, or are not in wide use any more.
That is OK: Life can’t have ups without having downs, and without some form of long wavelength repetitions: that’s what makes the journey so interesting (just think about the financial markets, there will be good times…).

Using FPC for iOS opens the road to develop applications using a very productive environment consisting of the Delphi IDE and the FPC compiler in a short while from now.

–jeroen

PS: two more events that I will be attending and/or speaking:

• The Delphi Rad Studio XE2 World Tour event in Brussels on September 8th 2011 (Embarcadero link; Barnsten link) at the Novotel Brussels Airport hotel.
• The Delphi Tage

PS2: Now it probably is more clear why I bought and installed my Mac Mini Server last year :)