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- Hacker News
- I remember Pascal as a so tidy and clean language... And verbose. Very verbose... And calling win API was a horrorby p0w3n3d
- 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.by nobleach
- On the contrary, calling Windows APIs was easier than in C, no import libraries required, just declare what you need and there you go.
- 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
by OCTAGRAM - The irony is that now in 2026 we have COBOL's revenge with Markdown driven programming.
Doesn't get more verbose than that.
by pjmlp - 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.by augustk
- 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.
- 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.
by StillBored - 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.
by t1234s - 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.by alexaholic
- 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.by SalaevAl
- 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
by datakan - Me too! So I was curious and watched What Happened to Borland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwkoaPl31Dwby esafak
- 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.
by wewewedxfgdf - 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?by OCTAGRAM
- Why would anyone use that over Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)?by albertzeyer
- I use both for desktop applications but as an IDE and for debugging in particular Lazarus is behind Delphi.by FpUser
- How good is Lazarus nowadays? Haven't taken a look for 20 years so this is a genuine question.by FooBarWidget
- 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.
by pjmlp - 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.
by OCTAGRAM - 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.
by felixgallo - 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.
by adornKey - 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.
by OCTAGRAM - 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.by cautiouscat
- 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.by cestith
- If you tried a 2005 technology, don't be surprised with 2005 customer service.by egorfine
- 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.by shimonabi
- 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.by aktau
- 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.
by fithisux