Delphi RTL remains in 20th century

I’m finding myself struggling to implement almost anything I try these days with most basic modern functionality entirely missing from Delphi RTL.

It’s medieval: there’s no support for any encryption, certificate management, creating or validating JWT or SAML (which also requires c14n, also missing in RTL). SSL has bare support and mostly through Indy.

Even new Win32 API’s are not being added to Windows unit anymore, like AddMandatoryAce (“new” is relative - it existed since Vista!), nor any new Win32 structs, constants and enums.

If you are lucky, there could be some 3rd-party units. But they may also not work right, or at all. Or you would have to reinvent the wheel from scratch.

All the things above are standard in all other languages. You can create a JWT or c14n XML and sign it with RSA with a couple of lines of code in Java or .Net.

Desperately hope that someone at Idera would see these shortcomings and address them ASAP…

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Totally agree - so many areas the RTL is lacking and what is there is subpar.

Not sure it will ever change while they continue chasing (and always being behind) the mobile market - which is like developing on quicksand - D11 is still fresh out of the oven but there are already new issues with the iOS versions (not to mention all the old issues.

My idea for the future of delphi would be to focus on creating a really solid RTL and then only on the things that others cannot do

  1. The compiler
  2. The IDE

And finally, invest in a real package management solution - getit just doesn’t cut it.

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Exactly. It’s not the right direction they are taking, surely. And in a number of ways too. But short of voting it out with our dollars, is there any feasible way to push for the right changes?

I’ll email Marco Cantu, worth trying.

Yes, I looked at mobile development a while back, hit a few walls and gave up: it’s not all that useful to me to spend the rest of my life troubleshooting simple bugs and some rather complex omissions.

PS: I’ll probably only start looking at the new compiler next week, just installed it.

Alex