I liked Borland Pascal, and I know Delphi is kind of ticking along, but I'd rather invest in a language that is growing.
Swift looks nice but still seems too Apple focused.
Don't want to start a war, just open to some tips on the ecosystem..
If you look at modern C++ libraries (like boost), you will see a lot of templates and free functions, and not a lot of inheritance or dynamic polymorphism.
I mean, people were already calling for more templates and free functions in 1997. It's not modern by any stretch of mind, it's just normal C++.
Rust maybe. Swift have at least a valid alternative to move to other platforms:
I wish Apple get smarter and put swift for windows and better linux.
Another alternative is D, which is basically C++ minus a few warts, the option to have a somewhat faster compiler (all modern C++ compilers are very slow) but it wasn't made yesterday so it has accumulated its own cruft (most common being that most of the new "flags" for declarations being in the form of "@stuff" instead of just "stuff" even though some older stuff being just "stuff" so things look a bit messy - in a similar vein, the new supposedly best practice, especially for libraries, is for functions to be pure and nogc, but this isn't the default so you have to put the declarations everywhere). Still, it is the most obvious choice for someone who wants a better language than C++ without changing too much.
There is also Rust, but i don't know about it.
C++ with Qt.
Every year I keep looking to see if a language will become available that will be able to replace Delphi, and there have been some close candidates, but nothing quite there yet. The close candidates right now are: AOT-compiled C# and Go. If you like the OOP in Object Pascal, then the type handling in Go will probably seem wonky to you, and as far as I know, AOT C# isn't quite ready, but I may be wrong on that front (it's hard to find information on the AOT progress with C#) and someone else can chime in with more information. I cannot understate what a game-changer AOT C# will be on multiple platforms, especially if they can keep the binary size down.
If that’s what you meant, C# fits quite well. The language is safe, very high-level but has easy ways to use C interop or pointer arithmetic, performance is adequate for many practical applications, asynchronous IO and multithreading are IMO best in the class, tons of libraries, good documentation, many users.
The main downside is limited options for cross-platform GUI. On windows it’s very good, on mobile platforms OK, for the rest of them (Linux esp. embedded, OSX) there’re no good options that I know of.
Another one is runtime size, current version is around 25-30 MB. No installation is required, but for some applications that’s still too much.
It supports polymorphic functions like other OO languages.
While I find functional patterns more useful in Rust, that doesn’t prevent OO design where it’s desirable.