Kylix programming tool

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Kylix was an integrated development environment sold by Borland. It was a Linux version of Delphi and C++ Builder that has now been discontinued. (Continuing Delphi's 'classical Greek' theme, Kylix is named for an ancient Greek drinking cup.) Kylix supports application programming using Object Pascal and C++; Kylix is particularly suited to the development of command line utilities, Apache modules^{[citation needed]}, and (especially) GUI applications, but not well suited to low-level programming, such as the development of device drivers or kernel modules^{[citation needed]}.

Though it interacts rather badly with many Linux window managers, the IDE is basically a very faithful port of Delphi 5. As such, it hosts a fast native code compiler, and offers tools for code navigation, auto-completion, parameter-name tooltips, and so on. The debugger is capable, if a bit subject to taking down the whole IDE (and takes a great deal of time to load).

Kylix features CLX, a Linux version of Borland's VCL [Visual Component Library], which is (mostly) a component-based control library, not unlike Visual Basic or .NET's WinForms. Like other component-oriented libraries, CLX contains both visual components (like buttons and panels) and non-visual components (like timers). The IDE makes it easy to select components and place them on a form, editing properties and event handlers with an "Object Inspector".

Delphi's VCL is an object-oriented wrapper over raw Win32 controls, that maps Win32 messages and APIs to properties and events and is thus significantly easier to use than the raw API. As such, VCL is tightly bound to Windows, and Kylix's CLX is built on top of Trolltech's Qt library. CLX is not 100% compatible with VCL, and most Delphi programs require some effort to port to Kylix, even if they stick to the Borland libraries and avoid any direct OS calls. However, Qt is a portable library and, starting with Delphi 6, Borland provided CLX on Windows as well, providing a measure of back-portability.

Kylix went through three releases, all of which were criticized for their relatively low quality^{[citation needed]} . The first version, in particular, struck many users as a beta-quality product that should never have been released. Versions 2 and 3 included bug fixes, and ported the remaining "enterprise" and C++ Builder features of the Delphi 5 model^{[citation needed]}. However, questionable quality and a high price led to poor sales, and Kylix was ultimately abandoned. Despite occasional Borland references to Linux^{[citation needed]}, there has been no indication that another Kylix version is forthcoming. There is no upgrade path to Delphi 2005 nor Delphi 2006, and neither seem to include support for CLX. Furthermore, the last official supported Linux distributions are: Red Hat Linux 7.2, SUSE Linux 7.3 and Mandrake Linux 8.2. With some tweaking, it is possible to run Kylix on Slackware Linux 8.x and 9.x. Kylix will run under more recent Linux distributions^{[citation needed]} but requires some research and additional configuration (eg. have an older version of glibc available, and make other changes to the default environment).^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Hagiography

Danny Thorpe seems to have been largely responsible for getting Borland to fund a Linux version of Delphi, and he did a lot of the work necessary to make the Delphi compiler produce Linux executables.^{[citation needed]} (While both Delphi and Kylix target 32-bit Intel processors, Linux uses different register conventions than Windows and, of course, the executable and library file formats are different; see DLL, EXE, ELF for details).

[edit] See also

• Delphi programming language
• Borland Delphi
• Free Pascal and Lazarus

[edit] External links

• CrossKylix - a third-party toolkit which allows you to compile native Linux applications from inside the Windows Delphi IDE.
• CrossFPC - a third-party toolkit still under development, which integrates the Free Pascal compiler into the Windows Delphi IDE.
  It allows multiple OS compile targets (including Linux) supported by the Free Pascal compiler.
  See more about it from this mailing list discussion.