We are profoundly sorry to say that we have been told of the recent sudden death of the extraordinarily talented Eugene Kryukov.
Eugene was very well known and respected in the Delphi community at all levels. Often, being asked to enumerate the achievements of a developer in such a short lifetime of coding can be straight-forward – but Eugene was so utterly prolific and operated at such a consistently high level of innovation, creativity, and technical expertise that it’s almost impossible to do justice to a life so completely, and extraordinarily gifted.
Table of Contents
Eugene Kryukov’s work has made yours possible
If you have used FireMonkey FMX, you have had your code touched by Eugene’s talent. If you have had a Delphi GUI application humming along on a Linux machine, then his FMXLinux components made that possible. CrossVCL, the astoundingly clever solution for getting VCL apps (a Windows only solution) to run quite happily on Linux too, is down to Eugene. He made things possible.
Eugene originally created a product called VGScene which was acquired by Embarcadero. VGScene was then renamed and expanded as FireMonkey under Eugene’s stewardship. He continued to work on FireMonkey including FireMonkey 3D and, latterly, was responsible for one success after another.
As David Millington said “Eugene was a very talented developer. He had a real eye for modernity in computer systems and brought that to Delphi through a strong focus on cross-platform and multiple different solutions to that – some people would have been happy with one, which on its own is a lifetime achievement, but through VGScene/FMX, TurboCocoa and CrossVCL, he built three“.
Eugene, a personification of the word ‘developer’
For most people that would be enough, to kick back, to say “I did something awesome”. But Eugene was not that kind of guy. He actively worked on FL Studio a gorgeously designed and hugely popular music creation application which puts its competitors to shame.
Yet, despite this overarching technical ability and tremendous output of creativity Eugene stayed grounded and was popular, managing to meet and befriend coders at all levels both inside and outside of Embarcadero. Eugene promoted developer attitudes and created core foundational technology that has been directly used and relied on by many thousands of people and will remain so for the foreseeable future. He had a massive impact. His influence will remain visible, and the results of his work used, for decades to come.
Here are a few words from colleagues
Sarina Dupont, Director, Product Management, Developer Tools, Embarcadero
“I was very saddened to hear about Eugene’s sudden passing. I first started working with Eugene back in the summer of 2011 when I joined Embarcadero, right as we were about to launch XE2 – the first version that included FireMonkey and multi-platform support. It wasn’t long after that Eugene visited Scotts Valley with Alexey Sharagin. Eugene has been a key contributor to the Delphi community and FireMonkey for decades. He was a very positive and motivated person, extremely intelligent and someone who could figure out fantastic solutions for very complex technical challenges. His contributions to the community will be felt for a long time, as there are countless Enterprise and consumer applications in the market today that are based on technology he was a part of creating.”
Bring yourself back to circa 2010: Delphi had gone through the Unicode transition, the IDE was improving, and rumours were coming out about Delphi compiling to macOS. And something else exciting was happening: there was this library I kept hearing more and more about, called VGScene/DXScene. It was modern: GPU-powered, looked amazing, a very impressive piece of code. As a Delphi user back then, I was very happy to hear it had been acquired. Since then, I’ve kept track of the various projects Eugene has been involved in. I’m a particular fan of TurboCocoa.
David Millington, Senior Product Manager, Embarcadero
We all have to leave, eventually, but it’s always too soon
All of us at Embarcadero are extremely grateful to Eugene and all that he was able to accomplish in such a short life which ended so suddenly. We would like to invite those of you who wish to, to leave a comment on this post. We will publish them as quickly as we are able to get to them.
On behalf of the entire Embarcadero team.