DevExpress VCL v15.1 – supported compilers

With v15.1 we are trimming the number of compilers (and therefore IDEs) that we are supporting with the DevExpress VCL subscription. As I’ve said several times over the years, supporting older compilers comes with a cost, perhaps intangible in many ways, but it’s still there and does have an effect.

In essence, if the compiler has XE in the name (and there are eight of these, times two for Delphi and C++Builder), we support it in both 32-bit and in 64-bit modes with our VCL Subscription. That’s the simple rule. Rule 2 is that RAD Studio 2010 is also supported (for now), although the new Rich Text Editor – you saw the beta announcement here 6 months ago, stay tuned for more news in another post – is not supported. And that’s it.

The biggest change then from v14.2 to v15.1 is that we are dropping support for what might be termed “the non-Unicode compilers”: Delphi 7, Delphi 2007 and C++ Builder 2007. As it happens, the new controls we’ve released from v14.1 onwards (spreadsheet, rich text editor, maps, gauges, etc) have not supported these compilers anyway. All we’ve provided over the past year for these compilers have been some enhancements plus bug fixes. Please note that Embarcadero do not provide support for them either (in fact, the last email I read was that XE3 is about to be dropped from their support and upgrade paths).

(Aside: it’s at this point that I did some research. Delphi 7 was released in August 2002, very nearly 13 years ago. I was using a Dell Inspiron 8000 at the time, with a Pentium III and 512MB RAM, running Windows XP (it cost me $3K). I wrote the Deflate and Inflate code for TurboPower’s Abbrevia on that machine. Delphi 2007 was released in March 2007, over 8 years ago. By any stretch of the imagination, these are old: just think of the progress made in computers, technology, apps, run-times, and programming languages over the last 8+ years.)

With v15.1 we wanted to do some major restructuring of the controls. The first part of this will be using the engine that’s part of the new spreadsheet control to provide way better XLS/XLSx export facilities to the grid, treelist, etc. This, candidly, would not be possible with the non-Unicode compilers. All in all, we felt the best business course of action was to consolidate our code to use the latest compilers and language features; it’s the only way we feel we can continue to provide deeper, broader, and, frankly, better features and functionality to our VCL customers.

Having said that, v14.2 is not going away just yet. Yes, it will be superseded by v15.1 in a couple of weeks, but we shall continue to provide bug fixes to it for the next year. Hence if you are an active customer you will still be able to download the minor releases until it, in turn, is retired.

My recommendation though is to move on. It seems to me that every month Embarcadero are providing discounts to upgraders. I would take advantage of them. Retire your legacy apps perhaps, or migrate them to the latest RAD Studio: there will come a day that we will start removing support for the early XE IDEs too. And, of course, if you’re using a later RAD Studio already, stay tuned for more news over the next few days on the new features in v15.1 of DevExpress VCL.

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