The guys at Embarcadero announced a few days ago that the next Delphi will be called Delphi XE and will be released in September. It will be a very minor update, nothing really new. There isn't anything cross-platform or 64 bit here. More details at the RAD Studio XE website.
As everyone could expect, their attempt at Delphi cross-platformness is buggy as hell and they will need one more year to get it working. Very understandable. However, instead of releasing a preview (or not releasing anything), they are launching a rebranded Delphi from last year with a couple plugins, for the price of a major upgrade. It's a good thing that most people know when to skip a version.
Still, some enthusiasts will want to install it as soon as a crack is available. The problem is that, as many of you will have noticed, the newest Embarcadero products are getting harder to crack, and at the same time there is a lack of interest by the programming community in anything new from Embarcadero. As a result, you may not see a crack until weeks after the official release. Scene release groups won't even bother making new cracks after every update. There is a general feeling that Delphi is a thing of the past, and I agree.
I see very little point in upgrading to new Delphi versions nowadays. Delphi was already a mature product at the end of the nineties, and as much as they try, there is no way to make it much more productive than say, Delphi 7, without breaking compatibility. Besides, we aren't in the nineties any more. We live in a world where open source is taking over (see Android). Basing new projects on a proprietary tool like Delphi from a small company like Embarcadero which struggles to stay afloat sounds crazy. I have advocated Delphi for years but honestly, I can't recommend it any more.
So is there anything better than Delphi? We all know the options, but in my opinion only one beats Delphi in every aspect (except in compilation speed): Qt with C++. It is vastly more complete than the VCL or even .NET, it is free, cross-platform, open source, usable on commercial projects, 32 and 64 bit, works with the world's best IDE (Visual Studio), the documentation is top quality, etc.
For these reasons, I would like to announce here that there won't be a next version of Delphi Distiller. Maybe it's time for a Qt Distiller ;)
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