What are major incentives to upgrade to D2009 (Uni

Question

I'm a hesitant upgrader when it comes to development tools. For roughly half of my product I still use D7, and for others D2006.

The truth is, although Unicode support is more than welcomed and very useful, it could cause me more troubles than gains with my current projects (they are more-or-less Unicode ready already). It's especially case with one of them who's performance would suffer a lot if each string takes twice as much memory as before.

So, Unicode aside, what are other major incentives to upgrade?

Answer 1

First of all I don't think you're going to notice that much of a performance hit.

Have a look at this

I'd say just generics make it worth the upgrade. Followed by Anonymous methods.

Answer 2

I recently upgraded from Delphi 4 to Delphi 2009, primarily because of Unicode, but also because of the many improvements everywhere in Delphi since my Version.

But the unexpected improvement that pleased me the most when I upgraded was the new IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Delphi 7 and previous versions had an undocked layout that drove me crazy. Now it is one docked form that can be resized and moved around easily. Not to mention many improvements to it that make every programming task easier. Remember, you spend all your programming time in front of the IDE, so every little thing made easier is a time saver.

When debugging and stepping through the code, all local variables are watched by default. That is extremely helpful.

The FastMM Memory Manager is built in.

And I now have both Delphi 4 and Delphi 2009 installed, and I can run either one, or even both at the same time. That was extremely useful when converting my programs, because I could debug and step through both together to ensure the converted program was working right.

Also, Embarcadero still gives a special upgrade price that Borland and then Code Gear did for all previous version owners. They didn't have to, but that is a great move on their part to treat the early adopters of Delphi as their VIPs.

What don't I like? Well, Delphi 4 started up in 2 seconds. Delphi 2009 takes about 15. But it's fast after that. Also stepping through code goes into the CPU code much more often because it is often inlined, and I don't think there's any way around that.

If you need Unicode, don't think twice about upgrading.

If you don't need Unicode, there are still enough improvements from Delphi 7 and earlier to make it worthwhile to finally jump.

Answer 3

I just gave the Generic Collections and the enhanced For-loop a spin (don't mind the visual ugliness of the code (e.g. if-then-else on one line)):

program genericTList;

{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}

uses
  SysUtils,
  Generics.Collections;

var
  myList : TList<string>;
  s: string;

begin
  myList := TList<string>.create;
  try
    myList.Add('Peter');
    writeln('Inviting Peter');
    myList.Add('Barbie');
    writeln('Inviting Barbie');
    if myList.Contains('Bob') then writeln('Bob has managed to sneak in...') else writeln('Bob is not invited!');
    writeln('List of invited people:');
    for s in myList do writeln(s); //feels sooo goood X-)
    readln;
  finally
    FreeAndNil(myList);
  end;
end.

After three years of staying away from Delphi, which seemed dying back then, I think I might return to this lovely world.

My greatest Delphi project seems to suffer from not being Unicode-ready, but Unicode is great stuff too, so I'll just have to fix the code in few places. Yesterday I also managed to get it to build and execute without errors (seems there was some sort of D2007->D2009 transition trickery involved) and I noticed that D2009 is just EXCELLENTLY FAST! It's better than the older versions in (almost*) every aspect.

*I have not found regressions YET.

Answer 4

Nick Hodges posted:

Top Ten Reasons to Upgrade From Delphi 7

They include:

1. Live Templates
2. History Tab
3. Dockable/Customizable IDE
4. VCL Designer Guidelines
5. New Tool Palette
6. Refactoring
7. Generics
8. Anonymous Methods (Closures)
9. Unicode Support
10. Ribbon Controls

In his Conclusion he said: "the hardest part about writing this article was limiting it to only ten"

and then he lists 24 other things (not counting Intellimouse twice).

Answer 5

To put things in to perspective, look at the things that were added between Delphi 7 and Delphi 2007. This was a significant high water mark.

http://blogs.codegear.com/nickhodges/2007/03/28/33579

http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/VCLAndRTLEnhancementsSinceDelphi7D7.aspx

Delphi 2009 sets the bar even higher.

http://blogs.codegear.com/pawelglowacki/2008/11/03/38527

http://blogs.codegear.com/chrispattinson/2008/09/19/38897

Here are some of my favourites:

• Generics (naturally) and generic collections in the RTL.

• Improved build configurations where they inherit from a common base configuration.

• DataSnap improvements, including removing COM dependencies.

• Faster and more stable IDE over Delphi 2007, which was no slouch.

I'm not sure how I'm going to use them in production, but you have to admit that anonymous methods are really cool. I'm curious to see how people wind up using them with threading.

Just two things about Unicode support (another favourite of mine).

• You will probably see a significant performance improvement when you convert your existing Unicode projects. I know I did.

• You will need to be careful about converting any code that makes assumptions about character size. You probably won't see many problems if your existing code is Unicode aware.

http://dn.codegear.com/article/38437

http://dn.codegear.com/article/38498

http://dn.codegear.com/article/38693

Answer 6

Delphi 2009 has proven to be much more stable than Delphi 2007, that alone for me would be enough to upgrade, delphi 2007 bugs and crashes are very annoying and stressful.