Some new versions broke compatibility with previous version's components. There was the case where you paid a good amount of money on some proprietary components and they simply wouldn't work in the next version: you were imprisoned in an obsolete IDE. By not being multi-platform (I heard it improved lately) you could only use it with/for win32 so it lost servers, embedded, cloud and mobile. By not being open-source nobody could improve it.
Then it had to compete with "native tools". Whoever develops for windows wouldn't quit ms' tools to use it, whoever develops for mac wouldn't quit apple's tools to use it, whoever develops for android wouldn't quit google's tools to use it, whoever develops for linux was mostly ignored after kylix.
Note that I didn't even mentioned price and license.
They improved it later, I heard. But seems more like the old case of too little too late. Most successful programming languages today are open source and multi-platform. Delphi was dependent on win32 for too long and it still is "too proprietary". You do the world a favor by porting your project to lazarus.
(Yeah I am not downloading the "Community" edition if I have to provide my name address and phone number. Really if your product needs mindshare and you offer community edition the least you can do is make it easily downloadable.)
Microsoft completely messed up the XAML / C++/CX development experience with internal politics, only to have the team responsible for C++/WinRT going on to have fun in Rust/WinRT, leaving the former in maintenance state.
Not that I would use WinUI anyway, microsoft cannot be trusted with UI frameworks anymore.
I also don't consider anything related to WinUI/UWP trustworthy for production development, and I used to advocate for it.
Stuff like how .NET Native, C++/CX => C++/WinRT transition, UWP => WinUI were managed, is how they lost most of us that really liked WinRT.
Additionally it has a symbiotic relationship with Delphi, similarly to how C# and C++/CLI are integrated, only much better.
Nowadays the compiler backend is based in clang.
> Ctrl+F "pjmlp"
I was not disappointed.
Aside, I have used this in the past for GUI on windows and it was amazing. Like .NET but native and better.
There is a newer version from Embarcadero, 7.20 from 2016[1].
The compiler in C++Builder is more modern and it will target 64-bit for Windows at least.[0]
[0]: https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Alexandria/en/C%2B...
