Or, “Borland misses another release date.”

Those of us who have been programming for many years have developed a love/hate relationship with Borland. On the one hand, they have come up with some incredibly useful and long-lived tools; I’ve been using Borland languages for, quite literally, decades. Delphi is my development environment of choice for Windows. And whatever they may be, Borland isn’t the Evil Empire of Microsoft. But on the the other hand, they’ve gone through some tough times– in an attempt to become profitable, they sold off most of their product line and nearly went under. They reorganized, renamed themselves to “Inprise” and came back from the brink. Recently they’ve reorganized again, and gone back to the original Borland name.

A couple of years ago, they announced their latest product, Kylix, which is a native development environment for Linux; basically, Delphi for Linux. It was publicly demoed, with much fanfare, and it was to ship in mid-2000. No one really expected that, and in July 2000, at the BorCon here in San Diego, Mike Swindell (the Kylix product manager) told me personally that the it would be shipping “before the end of the year.”

Towards the end of the year, it became obvious that they wouldn’t make that release date either, and extended the timeline to “release in first quarter 2001.” However, at that time, rumblings in the newsgroups were that there were still some very significant flaws. One of the beta testers who shall remain nameless (the NDA is pretty draconian) told me personally that he hadn’t been able to compile any apps that run reliably. This has been a problem all along– a very simple app that Mike demoed in San Diego locked up. (Talk about embarrassing moments!)

Now first quarter 2001 has come and gone, and you still can’t buy the thing. This has me terrifically bummed. Kylix, if it ever works and gets released, has the potential to change the Linux world overnight. Public perception of Linux is that it’s only for nerds and techies. To some extent, that’s true. But if even 10% of the Delphi apps out there get compiled and distributed in Kylix, it will outnumber all the apps that have ever been released for Linux in all other languages combined.

And every kid and college programmer out there who hacks on Delphi in Windows can hack on Kylix in Linux instead. That could be the boost the Linux really needs to move it from a niche operating system out into the mainstream.

But it can’t happen until they release the product.