Upgrades.

Maybe I should be kinda ashamed to admit this, but I've been using ancient Borland C++ Builder 4 (which is about 20 years old now) for most of my Windows development - until now. Mostly because there hasn't been any reason to upgrade or switch - VCL system (also used in Delphi) was just superior to any other toolkit on market back then.

The compiler was old, not exactly great with optimizations and not very compliant with newer standards either (which, granted, made working with newer libraries kinda difficult), but I just saw no need to upgrade. After all, most of my Windows software is simple-ish tools that don't really benefit from flashy UIs. Functionality over form, and I could throw sellable app together in half a day or so with Builder at this point.

I did try upgrading, with trial version of newer Builder, at one point, but I ran into endless number of mysterious issues with project imports. Although old, I still need to keep those older tools alive for some time now, so that was pretty much no-go. I've tried Visual Studio too, mainly for Unreal Engine stuff, but I'm not very happy with platform lock-in that comes as standard feature there. I'm trying to move away from windows (or at least windows-exclusivity) here.

So, I finally gave in and upgraded to newest C++ Builder XE8, or 10.1, or Berlin (now Embarcadero), whatever the version name is supposed to be), not least because they offer Android build environment right away and Linux should be coming soon too (hopefully, at least it was listed as upcoming feature). As a bonus the new version doesn't really interfere with older version, so I can actually have both installed and use older to maintain the older software. Nice.

So far I've played around with it and damn I like it. I can actually make software that runs on Windows and Android with just new compilation! Yeah, it doesn't look "native" (on android) by default but screw that, I'm still making mostly tool apps so slight UI irregularity isn't really an issue. If Linux build does the same, I'm absolutely sold.

But then. In previous post I was thinking about upgrades. When originally building this computer I prioritized raw disk space above speed - due to need to store massive amount of photos, videos and everything, this computer being primary source and with backups held elsewhere. SSD didn't fit in back then. Not enough raw capacity. And there still isn't really; for example my 10-year collection of camera RAW images alone is around 140GB now (and that is after initial culling of unneeded/unusable shots.)

But still, now I caved in, due to slow compilation speeds of newer tools, and got 240GB SSD as new primary disk, with most of the big stuff (like that raw library) held on old spinning disk. Of course that means complete re-install of everything. Which, as you might guess, will take a long, long time and never is very pleasant experience.


So now I'm slowly upgrading. Fortunately our internet is unlimited, I've used some 30GB tonight alone so far...