Last time I tried Delphi Community Edition, I had to give them my email just to download it, then when I tried any of the templates the IDE showed, it wouldn't build at all, don't show me a template if it doesn't work.<p>I received an email from someone asking how I was liking Delphi, I naively responded with my issue, but quickly realized he was just trying to sell Delphi. I would have bought Delphi over the years if they had a personal license for $99 or something, I am not investing thousands of dollars on a software where the free trial blows up out of the box (not intentionally it seemed).
I haven't heard of Delphi in ages. Where I grew up, I was the first generation to start high school with C++ as opposed to the previous ones who were stuck with Pascal. I believe I did some in university, but not much. Anyway, I am amused to find this news on HN. I spent some of the past 24 hours reading through — and trying to draw some conclusions out of — the Go vs Rust sword fights in <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261133">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261133</a> and <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47222270">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47222270</a> Mad respect for these guys not giving a funk.
Why would anyone use that over Lazarus (<a href="https://www.lazarus-ide.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.lazarus-ide.org/</a>)?
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".<p>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.<p>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.<p>Don't get me wrong, FreePascal is great, but it hardly has a presence at big corporations.<p>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 used briefly some 8 years ago, it is very good for getting full-native (including native UI toolkit) cross-platform desktop apps. It can build self contained binaries that just work.<p>My use-case was building a simple USB-stick-portable application for windows and it was great for that.
If you can bear his idiosyncrasies, Tsoding did a stream on it recently. It was pretty cool.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/4vcA7yJMoPg" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/4vcA7yJMoPg</a>
A lot of the software I really admired in the early 2000s was developed by single persons using Delphi. It seems to me like there is (was?) something promoted by a Delphi environment that is rare to find elsewhere, that lets people (a) quickly prototype cool stuff, and then (b) sustainably grow it into a mature product as it gains users. I wish I cared enough to learn it, but there's so much else I need to learn first!
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
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.
So much has changed. I remember driving past the Borland HQ in Scotts Valley every day on my way to work. Delphi was so cool back then with the object oriented pascal.<p>I kinda miss Borland
Borland should have made the language 100% free with a totally 100% free command line compiler and libraries.<p>Charge people for the IDE - everyone seems to hate paying for languages but be quite happy to pay for IDEs.
I'm an outsider, although I've heard cool things about Delphi. So, trying to find examples of what this looks like, I was naturally interested in the "Cool Apps" section. But my biggest surprise was that Beyond Compare was listed in there. I see that thing in a lot of Windows .NET shops, I always figured it was .NET-based (I guess I confused association with dependency?)<p><a href="https://blogs.embarcadero.com/beyond-compare/" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.embarcadero.com/beyond-compare/</a>
In Germany, Delphi columns are still rather common on the .NET developers magazine.
I'm not sure if it still does, but Delphi definitely used to support .NET.
Delphi.NET was a side project so to speak, and was mostly done under contract by RemObjects, which kept selling their compiler when Embarcadero decided to focus on native only.<p><a href="https://www.remobjects.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.remobjects.com</a>
Also Ekon 2026 is already announced with the respective program,<p><a href="https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/" rel="nofollow">https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/</a>
I remember Pascal as a so tidy and clean language... And verbose. Very verbose... And calling win API was a horror
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.
Even its precursors, on MS-DOS (Turbo Vision), and first Windows attempt (Object Windows Library with TPW), were great productivity tools.<p>Also I am the opinion Microsoft has never done nothing in C++, despite the Visual prefix, that could actually match either OWL, VCL or Firemonkey on C++ Builder, which shares most of Delphi tooling.
The irony is that now in 2026 we have COBOL's revenge with Markdown driven programming.<p>Doesn't get more verbose than that.
On the contrary, calling Windows APIs was easier than in C, no import libraries required, just declare what you need and there you go.