alt Hacker NewsUnfortunately, if you intend on using Delphi, that will be $1200 plus $399 a year for the basic commercial license, and if you also intend on using databases, that will be $4600 plus $1399 a year. Or, you could use .NET, which is $0, and overwhelmingly better supported at this point.
Embarcadero is milking a shrinking captive market, VMWare style. It makes perfect financial sense given the asset, but it's unfortunate for those of us with happy memories of Delphi 6 and 7.
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You don't have to use their premium database components. Just use something else as client-library.
I'm also not a fan of yearly payments. But with a $1200 license you usually get access to all old versions - including Delphi 7. After Delphi 6/7 at least Version 11/12 were usable for 64-bit. So I think at least once every other decade it is ok to get a usable 64-bit version of Delphi.
One can legally use Community Edition until income hits some limit. Paid edition can be bought and just used without updates.
> use .NET, which is $0
But tracing garbage collection needs 5x more available RAM than used RAM. Native conservative applications introduce memory fragmentation, estimated as 2:1 available:used. That gives 2.5x smaller memory footprint of native apps, and RAM prices matter lately.