[fpc-devel] Web language

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Thu, 26 Jan 2006, schreef VisionForce:

> I'm going to create my own server-side web language, and I was thinking 
> about using .NET. Does anyone here have any good reasons I should use 
> Delphi instead? Is there a place I can go to learn Delphi's string 
> parsing functions? Does Delphi support Serialization. What about 
> Polymorphism?

2/3 of the web servers runs Linux. Only about 20% runs Windows. By 
limiting yourself to the Windows platform you will throw away the majority 
of your potential users. Do not think Mono can save you; care should be 
taken your program will actually run on it, but more important, network 
administrators will not install the Mono framework on their webservers.

... which is an obstacle for Windows as well; you will require your users 
to install a very large framework which they do not like to download. 
Even if they have it installed it will use a lot of memory, tens of 
megabytes. Users will not like that.

.NET is a 32 bit virtual machine. You will miss the 64 bit revolution. It 
is quite likely that within 2-3 years, 50% of the systems will run a 64 
bit operating system.

.NET is also slow, but performance is usually not really important for web 
languages. However, if you want websites written in your language to 
survive Slashdotting, you might keep performance in mind.

So, you should use a language that runs both on Windows and Linux, and 
Free Pascal is a good choice. Delphi can help as well, but you should 
write your code so that it can be compiled by both compilers. About 
langauge features: serialization of what? polymorphism of what? OOP? Of 
course you can do that.

Lastly, the most important reason: If you use .NET, your code is obsolete 
when Microsoft decides it is, history learns this is every 5-10 year. 
Pascal code is much more durable.

Daniël