pouët.net

hi to all,
with my first thread i want to spoil that thing called first impression (me = newbie :) :- anyone seriously using delphi for demomaking in here? isn't it quite capable of doing things nowadays? And if not, why, does anyone have some more exact knowledge than "it's slooow..." ?

Oh, and the only one i know here is optimus from tum03 =) but sadly i believe that's nothing special...

it's not a good idea in general, because it's not really performance oriented :)
but then again there are nice examples to init both opengl and d3d in delphi/freepascal, so you might as well try.

Delphi is no problem, the coder is.

Ask Mazy/Noice, he makes everything in Delphi :)

(example: last Noice demo had a 3dengine written in Delphi:)

another problem with delphi is that it defaults to bloating your project with lots of VCL crap that you won't need. but it's not hard to work around that if you know what you're doing, and then the compiler's quite ok i guess.

all bullshit; besides that, it's just not *that* powerful.

I just hate it....
"it's not a good idea in general, because it's not really performance oriented :)"
"added on the 2004-01-06 by sir RICHARD kbab

all bullshit; besides that, it's just not *that* powerful."

OMFG, stupid... DO U KNOW DELPHI ?!? Did u wirte OpenGL Programms in Delphi? Did you read Hugi 28 - 4kb Demos with Delphi?
DON'T TALK SUCH A SHIT!!! *HOOR*

www.las.eu.tc <- my Page, there is a nonVCL Template...
www.delphigl.com <- a german/english OpenGL+Delphi Page
www.sulaco.co.za <- Jan Horns Page
...

"WENN MAN KEINE AHNUNG HAT EINFACH MAL FRESSE HALTEN"

las, fucking idiot. if quoting people, at least quote correctly. i did not say anything about performance.

i'm sure though that mister aser will like your suggestion, you could have however tried to post them in a somewhat more friendly manner.

suggestions, even. and stop trying to make points in german, we won't even try to understand it.

i'm not impressed by shouting german amateur programmers :) certainly not when they're referring to delphigl/sulaco.co.za's amateuristic laughable kiddie-stuff.

as they usually say in Holland the moment someone starts to rant about Delphi:

JE MOET JE BEK HOUDEN

Heh, theres absolutely NOTHING wrong on delphi, exept the lack of platform support, me myself doesnt like the syntax, but thats up to each coder what they prefer.

And wtf do you mean by "not powerful" ? The standardlibs are the same as in Borland C++ Builder, (wich are great btw). And truely, its nothing it really lacks that you need for a demo on win32..

I wonder why people are scared of such tools? Sure, its pascal syntax, but it has nothing to do with old turbopascal exept for just that, the syntax.

thanks for your answers, and the usual flamewar :)
arneweisse: is it schism? because when i looked up noice's prods theres only schism on pc in 2003 and that one's quite impressing.

and when it comes to jan horn's stuff i think there are some neat little proggies, but you know, they're not quite what i call going to the limits and thus no good example if delphi is usable in high end super megademos. after all, that was why i asked this question ;)

concluding the given information : delphi is not truly performance oriented, normally uses stuff noone needs for a demo so it's not *that* powerful but there's no general thing that would stop me from doing demos with it, because others succeeded at it, right?

oh didn't see last post of arneweisse: you are naming one of the reasons i use delphi: the syntax - sweet childhood memories of turbopascal :) but it can get somewhat annoying sometimes...

so, the stdlibs are a measurement of a compiler's performance statistics? oh please, i would've expected a little less shit talk from you :)

delphi is a fine environment which has it's own, albeit discussable, scope of production targets. it's compiler is not inefficient, does not produce slow code, but there are still, obviously, enough arguments why compilers like vc7 allow slightly easier and straightforward optimization.

but i am inclined to agree, since the average democoder today really doesn't know jack shit about what he is doing anyway. use delphi and have a blast, you probably won't do any less than the rest.

that syntax is horrible btw. but that's another discussion.

Sorry, for my aggressive comment ;]
Almost everything what is possible with other languages ist possible with delphi, u can do 64kb demos, 4kb demos... and so on...
Linux support => Kylix
Nothing stops you to write demos in Delphi.
But you should wirte your programs without the VCL, u don't need it.

and damn, there are no performance problems!

all apocalypse inc. demos and games were made in (free)pascal, too..
so it's actually possible to code technically advanced and fast stuff with this language.. ;))
and according to the german mag c't the delphi compiler also produces FAST code by now..
(they compared some java/vc/delphi-progs calculating the same stuff basically)

although i must say that the Intel C Compiler still can't be beaten by any other Compiler available now..
so if one has to do heavy floating point calculations and doesn't want to use 90-100% ASM for the code, it's a must to use C.. :((

hm what plek says about optimization sounds quite reasonable... oh well, decisions...

I would say you would have to know how C/C++ AND your compiler AND your platforms works to be able to use the optimizations tricks, something usually nobody does, or just doesnt care in everyday situations.

The bottleneck in modern demos arent CPU, but GPU, as soon as people learn this we could stop the flamewar about compilers for demos and shit, compilers optimizations for demos are kindof shit the same, prety much all my shit runs in same framerate in Debug compilation as in Release (accel stuff that is). Ofcourse, some shit in OLD productions is written in ASM; for instance metaballs etc arent effected by the debug/nonoptimizations...

AND ! Plek: Yes, the standardlibs is a good meassure on how powerfull a language is, that is , in functionality, as standardlibs are considered a part of the language.

Ohh and yes, Schism is the demo with 3dengine in delphi.

till .net, i've always used delphi for database programming, and I find it quite nice as a RAD tool... then again, I like C++ syntax for writing code (you don't write all that much code when doing RAD-development for a database application), so I used C/C++ for demos. Now I've found the perfect mix and will use C# for both =)

About the performance... well, most performance in nowadays demos (and it's getting worse everytime) is gfx-card oriented, and you'll find yourself many times when writing a demo, optimizing the fillrate and trying to "drawing as less as possible"... I don't think the compiler optimizations matter *that* much (to quote other posts) when writing 3D accelerated demos.

So, just go with whatever you feel like going. I've had people shouting at me for using C#, and see, I don't care =)

It's only my oppinion, of course

Personally i hate locking myself to one language, i prefer being able to do anything anyhow i like it.. A good way to do this is to have a C/C++ bottom, then a Managed C++ layer, then create a .NET assembly from the Managed C++ layer.

Then you can decide if you wanna use the native c/c++ lib, or the .NET lib.
I prefer using the .NET lib for most of the them combined with C#, i could write the native lib directly in C#, but as .NET isnt as portable yet as i want some of my shit to be (the corelib that is) i cant skip the C/C++ part yet :(.

Will be greatfun to see that .NET enterprise develkit from Borland with Delphi and Borland Builder, tho their C# Builder is a kindof dissappointment (straight ripoff on vs.net)...

Oh well, enough ranting...

For my little demo hacks, delphi was more than enough. To me, the syntax is clean and beautiful (yet, a bit bloated) compared to the butt-ugly c/c++ mess. :) It's all pretty much straight forward and other people's source is actually readable. My old D5 compiler still suffers from a few annoying limitations, but I guess they're gone in recent versions. Speed is not really an issue either, forget the old prejudices. In the end, it's all about taste, preferences and actual NEEDS anyway. A major problem is the lack of delphi specific resources: Most references, tutorials and papers deal with c++ code.

Oh, and the '4kb intros with delphi' article in hugi28 is fun to read, but ultimately, of no use. Shrinking the size of an exe file down to ~2.5kb sounds fun, but nonetheless, it's clear that such an intro could never compete against an asm or even pure c/c++ one. Delphi is definitely a nice RAD tool, but if you really depend on a small sized exe, you better go with c/c++ and/or assembly language.

scopes, scopes, scopes.

and indeed.. ~2.5kb, thats ridiculous, a few hundred bytes i'd go for :)

2.5kb unpacked?