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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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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).
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.
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.
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).
Ah I remember Dev-C++ - not bad for simple stuff, but I tried using it to import a Visual Studio project (which worked) but it wouldn't compile due to it not having any compiler intrinsics headers.
As C++ got more and more complex, it was not able to for Dev-C++ to catchup.
Dev Pascal was also a dead end.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would anyone use that over Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)?
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.
Sometimes I fantasize about switching back to native Delphi Win64 desktop development.
As a user, I still prefer those applications over anything else, especially when it comes to software I have to work with daily.
Both Java and .NET have always had this annoying lag, when it comes to desktop software. And don't get me started on SPAs.
In my current job, I'm working on a SPA application for a customer where individual users would be served much better by a native app. But deploying the thing in a cooperate environment would be a nightmare.
But the dream is still alive...
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.
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.
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.
I kinda miss Borland
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.
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.
I remember Pascal as a so tidy and clean language... And verbose. Very verbose... And calling win API was a horror
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).
I taught myself to write programs on a copy of Delphi 7 I got from a computing magazine CD (or maybe DVD... a long time ago, when Borland owned Delphi...) back in the day. It was great even for an absolute newbie with limited access to developer documentation or someone to properly teach me how to code in Object Pascal properly. I remember extensively searching for VCL packages too.
I'd definitely use Delphi again, and encourage it to be used, if Embarcadero were actually flexible on their licensing.
It's a damn shame that Embarcadero places so many restrictions[1] on Delphi Community Edition (CE) for even open-source contributions by anyone bigger than a small niche development shop.
If Embarcadero wanted to muscle back into the collective consciousness of software developers, allowing enterprise entities to use Delphi CE on open-source projects is a no-brainer, considering even Microsoft allows this with Visual Studio Community Edition[2], albeit with some other restrictions. Microsoft's enterprise limits on Visual Studio Community (250 PCs or not more than U.S. $1,000,000 or equivalent revenue) are so much more reasonable than Embarcadero's laughable $5,000 (thousand; not a typo) revenue limit.
An explosion of open-source Delphi projects might just revive it, if the CE licensing agreement wasn't so absurdly restrictive.
[1] https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/faq#tab-... [2] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-terms/vs2022-ga-c...
Borland C++ builder came with a nice manual book that explained object oriented programming from basic concepts. Lol those were the days..
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?)
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.
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.
Still no Linux support...
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.
Also Ekon 2026 is already announced with the respective program,
Oooh real 64bit ide instead of the crippled 32bit junk they gave as a demo for the past 10 years. Good improvement.
No Linux support is a shame. Fortunately there's Lazarus and FreePascal as an alternative.
SynWrite and CubicExplorer are two very useful Delphi Open Source Projects.
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!
C++Builder as well? Any updates regarding cross-platform support?
I have no idea why there's all these c and c++ alternatives and wannabes when there's Delphi/object pascal. That's my $0.02!
I think Delphi these days need a VS installation. Is that correct? It is not self contained like FPC.
No Linux version.
Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.