Can I easily compile my existing Delphi application for Mac OS X with Delphi XE2 (v16)?

Question

I have an existing Delphi 2009 application. I saw with the new XE2 release that we can now build our Delphi application to Windows 32/64 and now Mac OS X! Thumbs up to 64 bits and for Mac OS X compilation...

How good is the Mac OS X compiler? What do we have to do to compile our applications to Mac OS X? Will it only work with the VCL components or it will convert third party components automatically? How do we handle OS API calls now?

Answer 1

The Mac OSX compiler is, at present, only 32 bit. A 64 bit version will be included in a future release.

As for the VCL, I'm afraid you are to be disappointed. The VCL is a Windows only framework and will remain so. The VCL is hugely reliant on the architecture of Windows. For cross-platform (Windows, OSX, iOS), the new framework being shipped with XE2 is called FireMonkey. Porting a large VCL app to FireMonkey is a significant task. There have been a lot of blog articles just recently discussing FireMonkey and a bit of websearch will lead you to them. I would warn you that FireMonkey is very different from the VCL.

This is brand new technology and so expect some teething troubles. It will take time for the framework to mature and for 3rd party vendors to get fully up-to-speed with it. At the moment, you should not be expecting to ship a GUI heavy app for Mac compiled with Delphi any time soon. What you should be doing is getting hold of XE2, learning about FireMonkey and planning a strategy for porting to FireMonkey.