Oxygene “Nougat”

Some eight years ago, in 2004, we first announced our Oxygene compiler (then called Chrome) for the Microsoft .NET Framework. .NET was/is an open-standard and language-independent runtime, and our goal was to provide a state-of-the-art modern object oriented programming language that was based on and stayed true to the clear, human-readable design principles of Pascal, but at the same time took Pascal to a new level and made it easy for the new millennium.

We succeeded in creating a language that combined the best of many worlds, outshining the "standard" language of the platform (C#) with a complete superset of C#'s features, and, over time, adding many interesting and often unique language features, some big, some small that make developers more productive every day.

In early 2010, we started looking beyond .NET (and Mono). There was a second platform out there that fundamentally was very similar to .NET in concept, and also was fully managed. That platform was Java, and it was newly (re)gaining attention due to the increasing popularity of Android.

We set out to add a second "back end" to Oxygene to target the Java and Android. Just as we did originally with .NET, we wanted Oxygene to be a first class citizen on the Java platform, to directly work against the Java class libraries and emit 100% native JRE executables that would be — for all intents and purposes — indistinguishable from those created in Java. And of course we wanted the full breadth of the Oxygene language with all its advanced features to be available.

In February of 2011 we announced our efforts under the code name of "Cooper" and later, in the fall of 2012, we shipped the first release of "Oxygene for Java", the second edition of our great language.

But we won't stop there:

Nougat is a new project to bring the Oxygene to a third and completely new development platform, one of the most exciting and fastest growing platforms of today: Mac and iOS. We're not quite ready to say more much about this project just yet, but suffice to say we are very excited about “Nougat”.

Timeline

Nougat is currently in early beta, and available to all pre-order customers of Oxygene 5.2, and all Suite Subscription for Xcode customers.

The best way to get immediate access to the Nougat beta (and the final product when it ships in the first half of 2013) is by getting (or renewing to) our new special-offer "Oxygene for all three platforms" SKU, available at $499 for new users or $349 for renewals, including existing Prism XE2 and RAD Studio XE2 customers.