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kqr 13 hours ago [-]
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!
Tallain 11 hours ago [-]
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)
kaiken1987 7 hours ago [-]
I really find it mind blowing nothing else from what I've seen has really replicated it. Qt does an alright job but everything just seems to take 50% more effort to get it do the same.
ux266478 2 hours ago [-]
Delphi is definitely something I'd put up there with LispWorks, a really excellent example of what polished developer experience should optimize for. Even though it's not real live coding like LispWorks, you could see your UI evolve with your classes, without sacrificing drag-and-drop editing, and without having to do it in another language. Everything is seamless, and the libraries are all extremely well thought-out. I think clisp is a nicer language than opascal, but Delphi is still really good software.
A relic from an era where commercial toolchains dominated. Tools for serious corpo Engineers born riding the coked-up excesses of... I think conglomerates were capital's darling at the time?
marginalia_nu 13 hours ago [-]
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.
blackhaz 13 hours ago [-]
As a kid I remember I was lost in all that OOP, window handles and stuff, and could never do anything. Delphi was like assembling Lego. Very similar to QtCreator.
morkalork 12 hours ago [-]
It was like Visual Basic and Pascal had a baby
bdamm 6 hours ago [-]
It was never clear to me who showed up first, but I used Delphi first and then tried Visual Basic and was like "Oh! It's here too!"
ciupicri 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but on the other hand Microsoft also offered Visual Basic which was definitely easier to use. The code wasn't as fast, but it wasn't a snail as MS added a compile option (to p-code if I remember correctly) in version 4.0.
yold__ 7 hours ago [-]
Vb 6 got native compilation too
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Only to be killed in VB.Net.
It took all these years to have what should be in the box on .NET 1.0 instead of NGEN.
alexott 6 hours ago [-]
Back ~30 years ago, Delphi wasn’t easy compared to Sybase Power++! for example.
At that time it was really GUI based efiting
ChrisGreenHeur 12 hours ago [-]
I remember borrowing a book that had it on a cd, it already had the GUI editor, this must have been around 1997 or so.
Narishma 7 hours ago [-]
Mid 90s rather than early 2000s.
kevin_thibedeau 11 hours ago [-]
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.
vkaku 28 minutes ago [-]
Do ping the Wine folks to make it run; Chances are you'd need almost very few changes to get it to run. Delphi runtime is quite portable.
scrapcode 12 hours ago [-]
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.
haspok 12 hours ago [-]
Perhaps a better way to look at it would be to say that Visual Studio had a resource editor UI, basically a frontend to a resource file - that's it.
In contrast, Delphi provided you all the UI code by default, so even if you did not write a single line of code, your program ran and displayed a window or dialog with all the UI elements you could interact with. This was a higher level abstraction (one could argue VS did not even have an abstraction - you still had to code your window procedure from scratch. MFC was the first real attempt at simplifying UI code, but you still had to write code...).
But it did not stop here: it was trivially easy to add a database "connection" to your app (IIRC it was represented by a UI element that was not actually displayed), just provide the connection parameters, connect it to a complex UI element like a table, and voila - you had a live database view within 5 minutes.
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Not only has MFC never been at the same level as OWL, unfortunately to this day other than the short lived C++/CX, they never shipped anything comparable to C++ Builder, which shares the RAD tooling with Delphi.
Even doing COM in Delphi/C++ Builder feels more ergonomic than any of Microsoft endless C++ frameworks for COM/WinRT.
Tallain 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, a lot of non-visual components still require (or want) you to drag-and-drop them in the builder and edit many or most properties there. It's a weird thing to adjust to, and it often leads to a very cluttered view if you have a lot of them. Conversely, a cluttered view with a ton of non-visual components can be a very easy-to-spot signal that you might be trying to do too much in one screen.
thibaut_barrere 12 hours ago [-]
Even before, Turbo Pascal was fairly appreciated in some circles (e.g. demomaking), quite productive and nice to use!
oblio 9 hours ago [-]
Turbo Pascal was the go to IDE for small commercial apps for quite a few years after its release.
sieve 13 hours ago [-]
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
coldpie 8 hours ago [-]
Ran into this quite a bit while working on Wine, too. Start digging into a program's behavior to fix some Wine bug and, "oh, huh, it's another Delphi app."
giancarlostoro 13 hours ago [-]
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.
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).
pasc1878 13 hours ago [-]
This is the really annoying part.
Delphi's predecessor if not Delphi itself was $99 (Turbo Pascal).
giancarlostoro 11 hours ago [-]
I would have bought something like Turbo Pascal today. The minute they did away with Turbo Pascal I feel like they basically marked themselves as a legacy only company, I don't know anyone who is using them for net new projects that wasn't already all in on Delphi, you don't see new startups using them anyway. Had they kept Turbo Pascal, I do wonder how much more prevalent they could have been compared to now. It's still a solid way to make a native GUI.
lelanthran 10 hours ago [-]
> I would have bought something like Turbo Pascal today.
What's stopping you? You can open your wallet to lazarus today, if you wanted.
giancarlostoro 9 hours ago [-]
I've used Lazarus, very dated and doesn't look and feel quite as polished, there's been a lot of modern IDE advancements and none of them have made their way to Lazarus.
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
I can assure you that Turbo Pascal in Portugal was a bit more than that, because around 100 euros in today's money was the price with students discount.
As owner of a few versions with student pricing.
orphea 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
giancarlostoro 11 hours ago [-]
I could have sure, but it was for an account, and I can always unsubscribe or ignore them, doesn't phase me, I have like 20 gmail accounts that are old enough to vote, drink, and who knows what else
orphea 11 hours ago [-]
Haha, okay, fair enough.
aktau 13 hours ago [-]
My favourite Delphi program, and the one I learned to program with, was Dev-C++ (https://sourceforge.net/projects/dev-cpp). AFAIK there is a more recent fork, but I also clearly recall the 4.9.9.? versoin number from back then. It was very fast (including startup). I enjoyed it a lot back when I was still on Windows. Funny that Delphi was used to create a C/C++ IDE.
kokada 10 hours ago [-]
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).
fithisux 11 hours ago [-]
As C++ got more and more complex, it was not able to for Dev-C++ to catchup.
Dev Pascal was also a dead end.
cautiouscat 13 hours ago [-]
I gave Delphi a shot, but after setting up my account I got a few phone calls a few days later about it to sell me on it. I was genuinely surprised companies still did that in 2024/2025.
cestith 9 hours ago [-]
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.
egorfine 12 hours ago [-]
If you tried a 2005 technology, don't be surprised with 2005 customer service.
lelanthran 10 hours ago [-]
I wish we had 2005 levels of customer service.
rsynnott 10 hours ago [-]
2005?! Delphi is from the 90s!
morkalork 12 hours ago [-]
That almost sounds nice nowadays
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Delphi is from 1995.
shimonabi 11 hours ago [-]
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.
zerr 13 hours ago [-]
I wish Lazarus had support for C++ as well. Pascal/Ada's English prose syntax is a deal breaker.
pjmlp 12 hours ago [-]
Apparently Markdown is much better.
zulux 13 hours ago [-]
Pascal Syntax is horrible for programming. It's verbose and confining.
It's wonderful for reading ten years later and figuring things out.
pjmlp 13 hours ago [-]
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.
FooBarWidget 13 hours ago [-]
How good is Lazarus nowadays? Haven't taken a look for 20 years so this is a genuine question.
DanielHB 13 hours ago [-]
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.
My use-case was building a simple USB-stick-portable application for windows and it was great for that.
kmaitreys 13 hours ago [-]
If you can bear his idiosyncrasies, Tsoding did a stream on it recently. It was pretty cool.
Over the past year, I've replaced quite a few of my Tcl/Tk GUI apps with versions built in Lazarus. Lazarus 3.x was a bit quirky for my tastes, but 4.x has been very good.
It's not quite the Delphi experience, but it's close enough that I could see myself using Lazarus for day-to-day development and being fairly productive with it.
cestith 9 hours ago [-]
Someone maintains a GitHub readme comparing Delphi and FPC with Lazarus. It’s deeper than a couple of feature checklists.
It improved a lot and it is good. On Linux I think the default way to go is still Lazarus. But with Delphi you can buy more shiny polished things on top. So for commercial use Delphi is more relevant. And there are enough differences in compatibility, so you most likely don't want to deal with both at the same time.
FpUser 12 hours ago [-]
I use both for desktop applications but as an IDE and for debugging in particular Lazarus is behind Delphi.
SalaevAl 7 hours ago [-]
Can't believe Delphi is still actively maintained — and with features like this. Lost track of it years ago. Back in 2003 I wrote a university coursework in it; Pascal was my second language after BASIC. Might be time to take another look, especially with the multi-platform support.
wewewedxfgdf 13 hours ago [-]
Borland should have made the language 100% free with a totally 100% free command line compiler and libraries.
Charge people for the IDE - everyone seems to hate paying for languages but be quite happy to pay for IDEs.
OCTAGRAM 12 hours ago [-]
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?
alexaholic 13 hours ago [-]
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261133 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47222270 Mad respect for these guys not giving a funk.
datakan 14 hours ago [-]
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.
Self-learning programming in the 90's went from DOS batch files => MS Basic => Turbo Pascal then Delphi 1. Out of all of those I had the best success understanding what I was doing in Delphi.
Also Delphi 1 had the coolest installer graphics.
kopirgan 10 hours ago [-]
Borland C++ builder came with a nice manual book that explained object oriented programming from basic concepts. Lol those were the days..
pjmlp 6 hours ago [-]
Turbo Pascal 5.5 manuals were my introduction to OOP, and Turbo Pascal 6, Turbo Vision, my first understanding of a good OOP framework.
p0w3n3d 14 hours ago [-]
I remember Pascal as a so tidy and clean language... And verbose. Very verbose... And calling win API was a horror
StillBored 11 hours ago [-]
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.
augustk 12 hours ago [-]
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.
In regards to Modula-2 and Oberon, there are also the linages that he wasn't involved and are equally cool.
Modula-2+, Modula-3, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Zonnon
MattPalmer1086 14 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 13 hours ago [-]
Even its precursors, on MS-DOS (Turbo Vision), and first Windows attempt (Object Windows Library with TPW), were great productivity tools.
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.
ValdikSS 7 hours ago [-]
You can create chess with Delphi in a matter of literally 30 seconds.
Just install "Chess VCL" component, drop it onto the form, compile, and you're ready to go!
pjmlp 14 hours ago [-]
The irony is that now in 2026 we have COBOL's revenge with Markdown driven programming.
It is not. It’s created by Ingy, the same person who created YAML in the first place. It can be used for general purpose programming, but it fits best when you need a little more control over a system than configuring it with flat YAML. Think of it as (too)smart templates for you configuration files or flat-file data stores.
OCTAGRAM 13 hours ago [-]
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
nobleach 11 hours ago [-]
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.
andrewshadura 14 hours ago [-]
On the contrary, calling Windows APIs was easier than in C, no import libraries required, just declare what you need and there you go.
asalahli 6 hours ago [-]
Can't you do the same in C? You don't really need any headers, you can just declare function prototypes yourself
andrewshadura 6 hours ago [-]
Of course you can, but it's more cumbersome in C as you also need to link to the DLL, hence the import library. In Delphi, it's all controlled from the function definition.
But of course most of the Windows APIs were already provided in the Windows unit. Oftentimes with Pascalish wrappers.
NorthSouthNorth 5 hours ago [-]
Ha what a memory. In HS we started with Java, then the education department (I assume) tried to force us to switch to Delphi, and we had to learn about RAD development methodology, etc, and then, very randomly, we swapped back to Java. I think the schools couldn't afford it. I remember liking the language but could never get it installed at home.
ketzu 6 hours ago [-]
Delphi was the first language I learned, and I really enjoyed it. It was so sad it got less and less accessible to me, so I moved to C++ (Which became my favorite language for a long time).
Whenever I looked into it, I ran into the insane conditions Embarcadero has for a license, so I never went back. And realistically, I don't know enough Delphi/Pascal anymore to use it (or Lazarus).
uticus 14 hours ago [-]
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?)
In Germany, Delphi columns are still rather common on the .NET developers magazine.
afarah1 13 hours ago [-]
>the .NET developers magazine.
Surely it's online? Such magazine still being in issue would be equally surprising to me.
pjmlp 13 hours ago [-]
Nope, here you can still buy developers magazines.
Entwickler, .NET, Java aktuelle, Maker, Retrogammer can still be found on newstands, what happens is that not all of them have all magazines available.
You can get them delivered to your address anyway.
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.
throw-the-towel 14 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if it still does, but Delphi definitely used to support .NET.
pjmlp 14 hours ago [-]
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.
Delphi.NET was so much central project that 8 only supported .NET. Nothing else was ever needed as it seemed. Delphi.NET was 8, 2005, 2006 and 2007, then dropped. It was hosted in common RAD IDE and language was close match.
Delphi Prism was bundled somewhere between 2009 and XE2, a 3rd party product, hosted in Visual Studio IDE and language was resembling, but not quite. Enough divergence to not make it possible sharing source text with native Delphi.
vintagedave 12 hours ago [-]
(I work at RemObjects) - we've been working hard on reducing convergence recently, that is, still supporting our own Oxygene Pascal syntax but also accepting other variants of Pascal. We want it to be possible for someone to have a common source file as you suggest, much the same as you can with Delphi and FPC. It is possible today; we are working on the really esoteric syntax.
Our 'Delphi Island' support also allows linking to BPLs.
And we have our own IDE (for multiple platforms), as well as living inside VS.
throw-the-towel 9 hours ago [-]
OTOH Delphi 8 flopped so hard that the next version brought back Win32 support.
roughly 8 hours ago [-]
Delphi might still be decent, but Embarcadero is a fucking train wreck. That company's been Private-Equitied to hell and back. I was involved with them in a business capacity a bit back and it was an astonishingly poorly run company with some of the least competent upper leadership I've ever had the misfortune to come in contact with. It's a testament to how good Delphi was that it's still even marginally useable, because there damn sure hasn't been anyone competent at the helm for at least 20 years now.
antx 5 hours ago [-]
And they have spywares in their IDE and if they even think for a second that you're using the trial software in an unauthorized way, their lawyers will threaten you.
Like, they won't even try to discuss with their sales team, or try to clarify the situation. Despicable company if you ask me.
Unfortunately, if you intend on using Delphi, that will be $1200 plus $399 a year for the basic commercial license, and if you also intend on using databases, that will be $4600 plus $1399 a year. Or, you could use .NET, which is $0, and overwhelmingly better supported at this point.
Embarcadero is milking a shrinking captive market, VMWare style. It makes perfect financial sense given the asset, but it's unfortunate for those of us with happy memories of Delphi 6 and 7.
OCTAGRAM 12 hours ago [-]
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.
leni536 11 hours ago [-]
That limit is $5000 revenue per year. And this is not scoped down to "$5000 revenue from Delphi projects." It's basically student-only.
adornKey 11 hours ago [-]
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.
kitd 6 hours ago [-]
No Linux support is a shame. Fortunately there's Lazarus and FreePascal as an alternative.
kvemkon 13 hours ago [-]
Delphi - almost effortless programming memories.
> ... native Delphi apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.
In early 2000s there was Borland Kylix for Linux. Thus today (25 years later), if I'd use Object Pascal, then with Lazarus.
pjmlp 14 hours ago [-]
Also Ekon 2026 is already announced with the respective program,
C++Builder as well? Any updates regarding cross-platform support?
pjmlp 12 hours ago [-]
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.
zerr 8 hours ago [-]
No. While it did had cross-platform support years ago, nowadays it is Windows-only, including targets.
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Unless you're talking about Kylix,
"Delphi 13 Community Edition brings the IDE forward from version 12.1 to the Florence release. Users gain access to new Delphi language features, and refreshed Android 15 and iOS 18 support."
zerr 6 hours ago [-]
No, I'm talking about C++Builder specifically. They made it sub-par to Delphi.
pjmlp 4 hours ago [-]
It has always been sub-par to Delphi, e.g. VCL, FireMonkey and COM interop are all done in Delphi, probably they got tired to do OWL and TV twice in both languages previously.
Yet it still manages to be better than Visual C++, in the Visual part, if we exclude the short lived C++/CX.
I was only thinking about Delphi in regards to the cross-platform, maybe after they end up rebooting the whole compiler on top of clang it gets better.
Or who knows, as Embarcadero is today, maybe they won't bother to improve that, not many corps care about C++ Builder.
overgard 8 hours ago [-]
Man, some own-goals on this website. I went to download it to try it out and they want me to fill out a registration form. Fuck off!
Also, while trying to figure out the licensing restrictions on community edition:
> Can I install and use both Delphi CE or C++Builder CE together on the same machine?
> No. Only one or the other can be installed.
What?! It appears to be a technical limitation rather than a license one since the paid version has the same issue, but like, come on!
carlos256 7 hours ago [-]
No Linux version.
okanat 7 hours ago [-]
Win32 is the only stable Linux ABI. You can run Delphi apps under Wine.
nurettin 6 hours ago [-]
Oooh real 64bit ide instead of the crippled 32bit junk they gave as a demo for the past 10 years. Good improvement.
fithisux 7 hours ago [-]
I think Delphi these days need a VS installation. Is that correct? It is not self contained like FPC.
fithisux 8 hours ago [-]
SynWrite and CubicExplorer are two very useful Delphi Open Source Projects.
A relic from an era where commercial toolchains dominated. Tools for serious corpo Engineers born riding the coked-up excesses of... I think conglomerates were capital's darling at the time?
It took all these years to have what should be in the box on .NET 1.0 instead of NGEN.
In contrast, Delphi provided you all the UI code by default, so even if you did not write a single line of code, your program ran and displayed a window or dialog with all the UI elements you could interact with. This was a higher level abstraction (one could argue VS did not even have an abstraction - you still had to code your window procedure from scratch. MFC was the first real attempt at simplifying UI code, but you still had to write code...).
But it did not stop here: it was trivially easy to add a database "connection" to your app (IIRC it was represented by a UI element that was not actually displayed), just provide the connection parameters, connect it to a complex UI element like a table, and voila - you had a live database view within 5 minutes.
Even doing COM in Delphi/C++ Builder feels more ergonomic than any of Microsoft endless C++ frameworks for COM/WinRT.
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).
Delphi's predecessor if not Delphi itself was $99 (Turbo Pascal).
What's stopping you? You can open your wallet to lazarus today, if you wanted.
As owner of a few versions with student pricing.
But why? Just throw some garbage - a temporary email - at them if they so insist.
Dev Pascal was also a dead end.
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.
It's wonderful for reading ten years later and figuring things out.
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.
My use-case was building a simple USB-stick-portable application for windows and it was great for that.
https://youtu.be/4vcA7yJMoPg
It's not quite the Delphi experience, but it's close enough that I could see myself using Lazarus for day-to-day development and being fairly productive with it.
https://github.com/ideasawakened/delphi-and-fpc-lazarus-comp...
Charge people for the IDE - everyone seems to hate paying for languages but be quite happy to pay for IDEs.
I kinda miss Borland
Also Delphi 1 had the coolest installer graphics.
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.
https://miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html
Modula-2+, Modula-3, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Zonnon
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.
Just install "Chess VCL" component, drop it onto the form, compile, and you're ready to go!
Doesn't get more verbose than that.
> 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
But of course most of the Windows APIs were already provided in the Windows unit. Oftentimes with Pascalish wrappers.
Whenever I looked into it, I ran into the insane conditions Embarcadero has for a license, so I never went back. And realistically, I don't know enough Delphi/Pascal anymore to use it (or Lazarus).
https://blogs.embarcadero.com/beyond-compare/
Surely it's online? Such magazine still being in issue would be equally surprising to me.
Entwickler, .NET, Java aktuelle, Maker, Retrogammer can still be found on newstands, what happens is that not all of them have all magazines available.
You can get them delivered to your address anyway.
Here, https://www.presseplus.de/Dotnetpro-Abo
https://www.remobjects.com
Delphi Prism was bundled somewhere between 2009 and XE2, a 3rd party product, hosted in Visual Studio IDE and language was resembling, but not quite. Enough divergence to not make it possible sharing source text with native Delphi.
Our 'Delphi Island' support also allows linking to BPLs.
And we have our own IDE (for multiple platforms), as well as living inside VS.
Like, they won't even try to discuss with their sales team, or try to clarify the situation. Despicable company if you ask me.
https://www.embarcadero.com/starthere/seattle/mobdevsetup/io...
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/features/mobile
https://blogs.embarcadero.com/easily-create-web-apps-for-des...
Embarcadero is milking a shrinking captive market, VMWare style. It makes perfect financial sense given the asset, but it's unfortunate for those of us with happy memories of Delphi 6 and 7.
> 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.
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.
> ... native Delphi apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.
In early 2000s there was Borland Kylix for Linux. Thus today (25 years later), if I'd use Object Pascal, then with Lazarus.
https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/
Yes there is a community version for C++ Builder as well.
"Delphi 13 Community Edition brings the IDE forward from version 12.1 to the Florence release. Users gain access to new Delphi language features, and refreshed Android 15 and iOS 18 support."
Yet it still manages to be better than Visual C++, in the Visual part, if we exclude the short lived C++/CX.
I was only thinking about Delphi in regards to the cross-platform, maybe after they end up rebooting the whole compiler on top of clang it gets better.
Or who knows, as Embarcadero is today, maybe they won't bother to improve that, not many corps care about C++ Builder.
Also, while trying to figure out the licensing restrictions on community edition:
> Can I install and use both Delphi CE or C++Builder CE together on the same machine? > No. Only one or the other can be installed.
What?! It appears to be a technical limitation rather than a license one since the paid version has the same issue, but like, come on!