The RAD environment makes it insanely quick and easy to throw together a reasonably functional desktop app. Think WinForms on steroids. For all its age and the many cracks and seams, it's still very fast, easy for beginners and pros alike, and the final executable is a single tiny file (usually)

Delphi had a powerful and easy to use GUI editor in the early 2000s, much less of a hassle compared to building software with Windows' own C++ API.

I keep a Windows VM for one app that is a commercial Delphi program for embroidery editing. It's been around for 30 years and is on the path to getting cross platform support soon with recent GUI revisions. Always been pretty solid for a product from a small team.

The GUI builder was more powerful than the one provided by VS, from what I remember (20+ years ago since I've dabbled in it). I really miss that era. In certain circles you could open an application and almost get a sense as to who built it due to the craftsmanship / UI / attention to detail in the placement of the elements in the application, etc.

Even before, Turbo Pascal was fairly appreciated in some circles (e.g. demomaking), quite productive and nice to use!

I noticed this as well in the 2000s. Stuff like WinHex which I was pretty sure then was written using Delphi. Was into RE during those days, so I used to poke around the internals of software just for fun

It is funny that while I learned about Dev-C++ during my university course but it was mostly considered a joke by anyone that used Linux (including myself). I think the issue was because it shipped with a really old version of GCC even at the time, so something that compiled on it had lots of issues running in the more recent GCCs that Linux/Ubuntu used (including the teacher for this particular course).

As C++ got more and more complex, it was not able to for Dev-C++ to catchup.

Dev Pascal was also a dead end.

If you tried a 2005 technology, don't be surprised with 2005 customer service.

There’s always FPC and Lazarus if you don’t want to mess with proprietary Embacadero stuff. It’s not 100% the same, but it’s a pretty good equivalent that uses the same programming language (Object Pascal), has a UI builder, and all that. It also supports more platforms and even embedded development.

It's 90's tech. Their business model is selling expensive subscriptions to keep legacy projects alive. I was at one of the conferences in my country and the average age of a developer was about 60.

Lazarus does not support BPL. Android and iOS support are under question. Free Pascal devs for many years did not look into Ada, and looked into C++ more, and that made Free Pascal ugly. Delphi did not look into Ada either, but they looked into .NET instead, and that made Delphi not as great, but better than Free Pascal. Anything is better than C++. Delphi delivered controlled types, that was IIRC for many years in top 10 feature requests on Quality Central, until QC was purged. They call it "managed records".

Delphi has got inline const syntax. They talk about inline var, but from my Ada programming experience inline const is the real game changer. When there was only local variable block, some stuff was assigned inside loop. This stuff was assigned once per iteration, but since variable is declared outside the loop, it is considered variable. Now, when inside loop, it can be assigned once and made read-only. I have some doubts that Free Pascal is up-to-date with these changes.

Hi-DPI. Did not test, but questionable that Free Pascal got it right.

The IDE experience, they are the ones driving the language evolution, FreePascal follows, and the industry that cares about Object Pascal, usually only cares because of Delphi.

Don't get me wrong, FreePascal is great, but it hardly has a presence at big corporations.

If they no longer use Delphi, means they have long moved into either Java or .NET.

How good is Lazarus nowadays? Haven't taken a look for 20 years so this is a genuine question.

I use both for desktop applications but as an IDE and for debugging in particular Lazarus is behind Delphi.

This is the really annoying part.

Delphi's predecessor if not Delphi itself was $99 (Turbo Pascal).

> I had to give them my email just to download it

But why? Just throw some garbage - a temporary email - at them if they so insist.

Me too! So I was curious and watched What Happened to Borland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwkoaPl31Dw

Will you happily pay for Ada IDE? Another part of your proposal is already true. Ada has free compiler and libraries. Paid IDE is all that remains, that's how things work, right?

Recently dabbled in zig because I, like many people, want a "better C" that solves many of the footguns that C has (ex: null terminated strings, lack of integer overflow trapping, slightly higher level data structures) without all the complexity footguns of C++. But concluded its a miss too, I don't want all the dogma around packages, and symbol soup seemingly selected to be different than C. I largely want a "compiler" not a language ecosystem. Zig is seemingly forever going to suffer from chasing purpose built libraries. Aka, why bother with a zig formatter, or crypto when the first thing anyone is going to want to do is swap in openSSL/etc because its dynamically/runtime tuned for its target platform and contains that odd crypto code it turns out you need for pkcs11/whatever.

And the realization really is that Andrew Kelley's rant about go/rust/c, is answered by Pascal, which really is a "better C". Sure its verbose, but that I think is really a strong point in the end. Everyone has autocomplete editors and actually typing "begin end" instead of "{ }" is something your editor can be inserting automatically.

Also, calling windows API's was incredibly simple with delphi although almost unneeded, but the stdcall/cdecl decoration told the compiler to use C calling conventions instead of pascal.

Not sure if you mean Pascal or Delphi here. The Visual Component Library (VCL) was hands down the easiest way to build windows GUIs, no knowledge of the Win API required. But if you did need to do it, it really wasn't hard to do.

After Pascal Niklaus Wirth designed Modula-2 and then Oberon which is even tidier. Oberon is both smaller and more capable than both of its predecessors.

https://miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html

The irony is that now in 2026 we have COBOL's revenge with Markdown driven programming.

Doesn't get more verbose than that.

Yeah, it literally hearkens back to an era where "programs" were literally well-thought-out programs like you'd receive at a play - the cast list, the acts, the music, etc. COBOL on punchcards springs to mind here. Lots of organization. I don't hate it... but kinda like Java, it can be annoying to have to dot all the i's and cross all the t's to do such simple things.

Pascal was comparably clean, but Delphi library is quite messy. SysUtils is about local time, exceptions, floating number formatting and OS error handling. SyncObjs are about synchronization which is very good. But TThread resides in Classes, together with streams, serialization, base components, lists and other containers. Rapidly created form controllers are implementation of god object anti-pattern.

> And calling win API was a horror

This is not easy matter in any language. And I called Android API from Delphi. Still quite an adventure

On the contrary, calling Windows APIs was easier than in C, no import libraries required, just declare what you need and there you go.

In Germany, Delphi columns are still rather common on the .NET developers magazine.

I have used Beyond Compare for 20 years, and as far as I know, it has always been and still is written in Delphi. Quest Software, maker of TOAD for Oracle was also a big Delphi shop for many years. Not sure if they still are.

I'm not sure if it still does, but Delphi definitely used to support .NET.

You can compile to Linux targets though

One can legally use Community Edition until income hits some limit. Paid edition can be bought and just used without updates.

> use .NET, which is $0

But tracing garbage collection needs 5x more available RAM than used RAM. Native conservative applications introduce memory fragmentation, estimated as 2:1 available:used. That gives 2.5x smaller memory footprint of native apps, and RAM prices matter lately.

You don't have to use their premium database components. Just use something else as client-library.

I'm also not a fan of yearly payments. But with a $1200 license you usually get access to all old versions - including Delphi 7. After Delphi 6/7 at least Version 11/12 were usable for 64-bit. So I think at least once every other decade it is ok to get a usable 64-bit version of Delphi.

Cross platform support exists but works by having Windows as the main development environment than then cross compiling into the varios platforms.

Yes there is a community version for C++ Builder as well.

Nuh-uh. http://www.isdelphidead.com/