Has any one used CrossKylix for real Cross-platform development?

Question

New version of CrossKylix as been updated two weeks ago.

Even Kylix has discontinued long time ago, but it's seems still used by some of Delphi developers.

Has any one used it successfully on cross-platform development for Windows and Linux?

Answer 1

As Mason said, we're using CrossKylix for the Linux version of Beyond Compare, but only for release builds, which are kicked off from FinalBuilder. For that usage, it's been great. We did try doing CLX development on Windows for a while, but CLX for Windows had different bugs than CLX for Linux, so it wasn't worth it long-term.

Our actual Linux development is still done using Kylix 3 running on SuSE 10 virtual machines. We use both GDB and the Kylix debugger for debugging, though the Kylix debugger doesn't work well for backgrounds threads anymore. We dropped CLX design-time support a long time ago though, so almost all of our feature development is done in Delphi 2007 and the VCL.

I am also actively using Simon's other project, CrossFPC, for our 64-bit Windows shell extension, and it's worked great.

Answer 2

I'm using CrossKylix for years, and it worked for me like a charm. It's one of the reasons why I like to maintain Delphi 7 compatibility in our source code, because Kylix 3 is based on the same compiler as Delphi 7: only the back-end generates natively ELF files instead of EXE.

For server applications and command-line tools, even a small cgi program, CrossKylix is just great! You can develop and test with Delphi under Windows, then Cross-compile it, and run the executable under Linux with no problem. I've used this for years on a french "dedibox" with runs under a Via C7 (now much faster Nano) CPU, and made AES and SHA encryption of the data in more than 1500 KB per second (yes KB per second, not bytes per second) thanks to the PadLock engine!

I discovered some problems about the Kylix RTL and WideString under modern linux: if your Linux is configurated with UTF-8 encoding (which is now the standard for most distributions), WideString usage failed. So I've corrected this in the Kylix system.pas: in fact, our Enhanced RTL is cross-platform, and works with Delphi 7 and CrossKylix. See http://synopse.info/forum/viewtopic.php?id=66

Answer 3

In one of Jim McKeeth's early podcasts, he interviewed Craig Peterson of Scooter Software, one of the coders for BeyondCompare. He mentioned how they used CrossKylix for the Linux port of BeyondCompare.