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Kylix was a Linux version of Delphi and C++ Builder that has now been discontinued. It was Borland's integrated development environments . (Continuing Delphi's 'classical Greek' theme, Kylix is named for an ancient Greek drinking cup.) Kylix supports application programming using Object Pascal and C++; you can use Kylix to write command line utilities, Apache modules, and (especially) GUI applications, but you can't use Kylix to write device drivers or kernel modules.
Though it interacts rather badly with many Linux window managers, the IDE is basically a very faithful port of Delphi 5. As such, it hosts a fast native code compiler, and offers tools for code navigation, auto-completion, parameter-name tooltips, and so on. The debugger is capable, if a bit subject to taking down the whole IDE (and takes a great deal of time to load).
Kylix features CLX, a Linux version of Borland's VCL [Visual Component Library], which is (mostly) a component-based control library, not unlike Visual Basic or .NET's WinForms. Like other component-oriented libraries, CLX contains both visual components (like buttons and panels) and non-visual components (like timers). The IDE makes it easy to select components and place them on a form, editing properties and event handlers with an "Object Inspector".
Delphi's VCL is an object-oriented wrapper over raw Win32 controls, that maps Win32 messages and APIs to properties and events and is thus significantly easier to use than the raw API. As such, VCL is tightly bound to Windows, and Kylix's CLX is built on top of Trolltech's Qt library. CLX is not 100% compatible with VCL, and most Delphi programs require some effort to port to Kylix, even if they stick to the Borland libraries and avoid any direct OS calls. However, Qt is a portable library and, starting with Delphi 6, Borland provided CLX on Windows as well, providing a measure of back-portability.
Kylix went through three versions, none of which were of particularly high quality. The first version, in particular, struck many people as a beta that should never have been released. Versions 2 and 3 fixed some bugs, and ported the remaining "enterprise" and C++ Builder features of the Delphi 5 model. However, low quality and a high price lead to poor sales, and Kylix was ultimately abandoned; despite occasional Borland references to Linux, there are no indications that another Kylix version is forthcoming. There is no upgrade path to Delphi 2005 nor Delphi 2006, and neither seem to include support for CLX. Furthermore, the last official supported Linux distributions are: Red Hat Linux 7.2, SUSE Linux 7.3 and Mandrake Linux 8.2. With some tweaking, it is possible to run Kylix on Slackware Linux 8.x and 9.x. Kylix will run under more recent Linux distributions but requires some research and additional configuration (eg. have an older version of glibc available, and make other changes to the default environment).
Hagiography
Danny Thorpe seems to have been largely responsible for getting Borland to fund a Linux version of Delphi, and he did a lot of the work necessary to make the Delphi compiler produce Linux executables. (While both Delphi and Kylix target 32-bit Intel processors, Linux uses different register conventions than Windows and, of course, the executable and library file formats are different.)
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