I agree with you and Marco that Delphi IS the VCL, be it .net or native, to some extend, but it is also a heck of a compiler. I tend to separate compilers. languages and frameworks. Otherwise I get confused

And the new released BDS version is rather a positive experience.
But I knew that.

You should try some mono! That way you’ll be able to judge for yourself that Xplatform is a viable Delphi.net option.

Thaddy: Yes, I agree that other compilers have their place too, especially for cross platform projects but Delphi is so much more that just an compiler.

I must quote Marco Cantù and say “Delphi is the VCL” (http://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/delphi_is_vcl.html).CLX was a great move to make a VCL clone that does not depend on the Win32 API but instead on the Qt library that exists for more platforms.

Migrating a project that uses CLX to VCL is probably manageable and you could probably succeed to make it VCL.NET compatible too so you can run it in CLR. But VCL.NET is still depending on the Win32 API (like WinForm does too) and even if you could get it to run under Mono you would either have to emulate Win32 on the other platform or create a VCL clone (like CLX) that calls another API.

I’m not an expert on Mono but I think the idea is great to have a platform independent managed runtime environment but reimplementing clones of Microsoft’s class libraries and always playing catch up might not be a good idea.

Another thing is that mono and .net go together quite well. So, there is a migration path for Kylix, be it a bit more difficult. (Taking the stpes mentioned above and then migrating it to .net and mono)