24 years of Delphi and Delphi 10.3.1 is out Today

For almost 11 years now, I've been working professionally with Delphi. And it would be wrong to say it's been a smooth ride. There's nothing wrong - per say - with Object Pascal. Or rather, it's not worse than C++, but Delphi - i.e. the library and IDE - is what's lacking behind.

It was definitely cutting edge in the mid-90s, but it has not managed to keep with the times. Most Delphi developers rely on Indy, a third party library of various classes, that provide a lot of functionality the base library should have provided. And even Indy isn't that quick at picking up new features as the world moves on.

When Embarcadero took over from Borland around 2009, they clearly tried to move it on a direction that would encourage more developers. They created ways to build your Delphi application for iOS and Android, which was meant to get more people to write Delphi. It didn't, since the IDE still cost over $1,000 a year. I'd imagine the people who used that functionality were those who were already 'stuck' with Delphi.

Indeed, even as one who engages a lot in the Delphi community, mostly through necessity, notice that very few people join the community without having some legacy application to maintain. And the community as a whole is dwindling anyway.

Embarcadero should have focused on core aspects of the language, which they are finally getting around to. You can now declare variables in the middle of function? That's so 21st century! (Although the forward compiler can't figure it out, so you'll see a lot of red lines in your IDE if you do.)

I won't be writing Delphi professionally a lot longer, though. As I am taking a new job this March, where I am moving on to Go. So it's more a bittersweet good bye for me. Because Delphi is frustrating to work with on a daily basis, but there is a lot nice about it.

I'm amazed about once every three years when I hear or read something that reminds me delphi is still around. For nostalgia's sake, here's a link to the pre-release review of Delphi 95 that I wrote for Dr. Dobb's back in the day: http://www.drdobbs.com/a-quick-look-at-borlands-delphi-95/18.... Doesn't seem like such a quick look now, but articles were longer back then :).

I started working professionally in Delphi around 1998, and then spent 13 years evolving and maintaining a sprawling 2+ mloc reservation system.

They had a great thing going around that time, but then the pivoting and squeezing started. Instead of evolution we got enterprices, buzzwords and bit rot. By Delphi7, I'd say it was already as good as dead.

All owners so far share an unfortunate tendency to oversell half-baked solutions with no future, all the way up until the point where they pivot and push a brand new successor with no future while deprecating the previous attempt asap.

Their database, Interbase; was open source for about a month. Until the suits realized that no one would buy their shiny enterprice crap if they could simply download it for free, and it was closed again asap. Only now all the people who knew anything had joined effort in a fork called FirebirdSQL.

It was even released for Linux under the name Kylix, free for non-commercial use if I remember correctly. Until Microsoft bullied them into dropping the cross-platform game right now in return for cozy time with the centerfold creep and his side kick sweaty monkey. I just threw up a little in my mouth writing that so I'll stop here.

Back in the late 90's this was my favorite development environment. Still have fond memories of it. Back when "Rapid Application Development" was the buzzword of the day, it actually delivered.

Also related, lazarus 2.0 was recently announced. It even has an online package manager.

http://forum.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?topic=44161.0

Embarcadero tools and ides, are super expensive considering that most developer tools are either free (visual studio developer is free for individuals), or way cheaper (jetbrains)

I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following

Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive

Free-pascal is cute and probably productive, but there are way more intellectually and technically interesting options, even tcl/tk in my opinion is better intellectual and technical investment of time compare to free-pascal

The article mentions that the binary size of the listbox example is significantly different. Well, we used to say that Delphi 1 is totally wasteful as the default empty project compiled into 39kB .exe, obviously full of bloat ;)

Edit: 39kB was nothing even in the 1995. But there was other more significant issue: if you went for all the database and line of bussines suport libraries you ended up with application that used more 3.5" floppy disks than contemporary Windows 3.1, one for your application and 7 additional for the redistribuable frameworks ;)

Got to say, other than the font being much nicer now, some of those old screens look a whole lot better and easier to navigate. I miss buttons that look like buttons.

I've been a Delphi developer off and on for 20+ years (since 2, though dabbled with 1). A lot of people focus on the object pascal and it is dated as a language, though the latest is catching up. The IDE has problems now and then with code completion - it pauses a lot and sometimes just stops working, if you come from Visual Studio or XCode this is incomprehensible and annoying.

Where Delphi shines is the VCL - the Visual Component Library and the third party component market. You can integrate components into the IDE by writing them in pascal. Even now there are still lots of components for pretty well anything - even web development.

It also has cross platform components that you can run on iOS/Android/Mac and Windows (edit: theres also a server side linux one) all with the same code, they are compiled to native and if you want you can write native components on all these platforms.

A lot of windows C# components available for sale are actually written in Delphi

You can connect to databases using components, I've written native socket servers by just dragging a couple of components on to a form. For writing business apps there is nothing superior imho

There are components for web development where you can write an SPA all in Pascal and use components

There's a free community edition available now https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter so if you've never looked at Delphi have a look.

I remember using Turbo Pascal, basically the predecessor of Delphi. I had tried Amiga Basic before, but this was the first time that I was being helped by a teacher and actually understanding what I was doing, rather than just copying scripts from Amiga Magazine line by line. I was in my first or second year of high school and, IIRC, we had PCs with 486 CPU (Pentium had already launched but it was very expensive). I remember one day a friend of mine came and told me that Intel was going to make a 1Ghz CPU, I didn't believe him. It would take a few more years before I tried the Internet for the first time.

Delphi was a great way to get into programming as a kid. You could just drop an image and a timer onto a form, set it to 50ms, edit the onElapse event to move the image according to key-presses, and you've got the start of a simple game! All in a way that is visual and makes intuitive sense to any non-programmer.

And the beauty of the language/IDE was that you could develop serious, complex applications with it, too.

Is there anything similar on the market today? I had a ton of fun with Delphi as a teenager!

Delphi (and Borland C++ Builder) was a lot of fun back in the day. Linux ecosystem wasn't as mature, and people who insisted on on using the Microsoft toolchain had to deal with some insane bullshit like MFC, ATL/WTL, or bare Win32 API. In the meanwhile, people using Borland stuff were cranking out superior (and faster) apps out of components downloaded online, and using drag&drop. What would take weeks and a lot of head scratching in MFC was like 10 minutes in Delphi, and you _knew_ you got it right. It was RAD if you pardon my pun.

Delphi was my first exposure to a real programming language almost 20 years ago. I'm very glad that it was it as I look upon the landscape of software engineering nowadays and it's totally opaque to beginners.

Delphi has right abstractions in a right place - you designed the form in a easy GUI and filled in methods with your code [0].

Why it was that way? Because it was designed to be simple and it worked (no need for Bret Victor's magic). (There was a blog of former Delphi developer that explained their thought process)

For the record I worked professionally in JavaScript (TypeScript) (backend and frontend), Java (Kotlin), C# and Ruby. I also did small chunks of support code in C/C++, Rust, Red/Rebol, Python, PHP, Go, Prolog and Lua.

If I wanted to teach kids programming today, something easy to understand but at the same sufficiently complex I'd probably choose Delphi (Lazarus looks like Delphi 5/7 from screenshots).

[0]: manual memory management was harder than GC but on the other hand it thought a lesson...

I, like many others, loved and used Delphi a lot in the 90s, but for one major client we identified a major risk was the declining availability of Delphi developers (in Australia, at least), and I did a rewrite of the entire app into C#, splitting off the calculation part (it being a financial application) into a separate 'core' which is now re-usable across Windows, MacOS and web. At the time we did this it wasn't even clear if Delphi the product was going to survive. I'm glad it has, but the rewrite was the correct decision (yes, as risky as rewrites can be).

Nobody mentioned the form inheritance feature of the VCL, the consequent applying of OOP principles for UI. Because all interface elements are implemented as (object) components, in Delphi, you can easily group an arbitrary assembly of UI elements in a frame object and make it readily available as a new “component” for reuse; a great way to reuse standard design in big commercial applications. Another way of accelerating the production is to design similar screens as subclasses of a common screen. You can pack then all the common functionality in the ancestor screen and don’t waste time to copy-paste or worrying about error propagation. Of course, one can group common functionality in classes or procedures but UI functionality is very often bound to a certain UI element and not generic. Thus form inheritance is much more efficient than the (otherwise) standard practice. I designed once an application for museum management with a lot of different working screens but they are similar in some functionality. Using form inheritance I could avoid designing big generic working screens, which could be very confusing and annoying for the users, but offer instead specific screens for specific tasks and still saving a lot of time (and debugging headache). I estimate using form inheritance in Delphi helped me at the time to increase the productivity of the UI implementation phase up to the factor of 5! I guess other systems could do similar things but not as elegant as Delphi though. In term of desktop applications, I believe none other can be as productive as Delphi.

Anyone remember Borland C++ Builder? I migrated away from Delphi to C++ Builder as soon as it came out. It still used DCUs tho from memory. Thems were the days

Wow. Delphi.

It was probably the first tool/language I got in contact with while in school. I didn't had any idea what I was doing, playing around with the parallel port trying to read sensor data for a school project.

I think I ended with Delphi 7, most probably some pirated copy of the Professional version, to have all those fancy libraries where I had no idea what to do with.

Wondering whether I should get into it for the sake of the old times. :-)

What's today's equivalent? Something that can produce native binaries for at least windows, mac, linux? The one I see pushed a lot is electron, and there are some cool ideas, but nothing stable that I know of.

It’s weird that the project options dialog still offers to work around the Pentium FDIV bug. Are any of the current compile targets still afflicted? Like, can 2019 Delphi still compile me a win95 pentium binary?

Marco Cantu's (the author of this blog) books on Delphi are/were a great resource for learning the language.

Btw, his website is under heavy load right now (probably the HN hug?), and this is the error I got:

Error in page: /blog/2019-february-24-years-delphi.html

Error Class: EListError

Error Message: List index out of bounds (-1)

Suggesting that the webserver is written in Delphi... that's dedication :)

Niklaus Wirth turns 85 today (Feb 15th). Happy Birthday!

Any mention of Delphi always brings back fond memories of my first job. We were doing amazing things with Clipper at the time, with a bit of Turbo Pascal on the side. Then windows took root and the world opened up with promises from Visual Objects and Dephi - but VB ended up the winner and that was the end of that.

We would play with Delphi and SmallTalk just for fun and there was always a Dephi fanboi around.

Despite these 'primitive' tools we were so much more productive back then - it's quite sad where we have ended up. We would pump out wonderful apps even in the days before we could get our hands on a relational database. dBase files, VSAM files and even trusty CODASYL did the job without any fuss.

We use Delphi, because we are productive with it, but it is seriously sorry.

Yes, you can develop 64 bit apps with it, but the IDE is still a 32 bit app, which causes problems with large projects.

The Indy components (e.g. http) are unsafe and shitty.

Personally I don't think there is much to recommend.

I remember you could always tell apps that were written in Delphi by the non-standard Ok/Cancel buttons with the icons.

I have so many fond memories of putting together quick apps with Delphi "back in the day". Every now and again I'd buy a copy of PC Plus magazine just because they had Delphi 1, 2 or 3 on the cover CD.

I really miss the RAD concept, and I'd love to find a modern tool which had that aspect of Delphi, though perhaps with C++ or Python as a backing language.

I know there's Lazarus (opensource Delphi), but it's C++Builder I miss... wxWidgets is close, but not quite the nice quickly-have-something-presentable environment I remember.

Throwing the cat among the pigeons... does anyone remember Kylix?

I forgot that Delphi was sort of a mash-up of Visual Basic and Pascal. Two great tastes, I guess.

Are there contemporary products -- for building mobile and/or web apps -- that are similarly easy to use?

In Australia we have the Australian Delphi Users Group. We are having a conference next month.

https://www.adug.org.au/meetings/symposiums/2019-symposium/

It will have a range of topics including showing how to borrow some techniques from other languages and showing how to use some of the new functionality in the latest releases.

Reading through the comments and as a 20+ years developer, using mainly Delphi, and with past 10 years as freelancer exclusively using only Delphi I realize people here don't actually understand what this IDE is doing. So here are a few points:

a - About dying and used only for legacy projects. Well, when a company wants something fast to win their customers hearts and push through next phase of moneygrabbing, do you think they care about latest technologies? Dirty Delphi does the job in 5 hours, what in others takes days if not weeks.

b - price too high. Correct, it is. But when you fly your technicians across entire continental US to deal with a hardware problem at one of your venues do you think 5k USD/year is much? That's pocket change.

c - Younger developers do not learn it. Well, younger developers should not learn anything but only one language for at least 3 years, ideally while still in college, and absorb instead algorithms/paradigms/math - skills more valuable then a computer language syntax. Once you master those and a language, no matter what, the entirety of the rest of languages are nothing more then syntax equivalent. Hence grabbing Delphi should be a maximum 3 weeks venture, after that I'd expect that young developer to be able to solve problems. I did just that, with Pascal in my beginnings and over the years/companies I've worked for I learned Java/C/C++/PHP/ASM/VB/ASP/ etc etc. Knowing how to implement quicksort in Pascal is the same as in C++, it's a syntax equivalent, nothing more.

d - Many comments about native - this is a type of comment from proponents. Well, in my experience that nativity was such a hassle for me that I'd rather go away with it and used Dalvik/the new ART instead in case of Android, but it is what it is.

Feel free to AMA.

I don't know if it's just me but what I noticed right away in those screenshots is that the older Windows 3.1 interface is much easier on the eye that the modern one. You can easily tell what's clickable and what's not, the contrast is good, the fonts and colors are consistent. All that while using a fraction of the resources.

In 1997 I wrote an application for our state revenue office that helped their customers produce correct pay-roll annual adjustment forms. It was written in Delphi, had to run on Windows 3.1, 95 and NT, and distributed to around 19,000 customers and CPAs on 3.5" diskettes.

Delphi well fit the constraints of the time.

Delphi made me lots of applications and money. It was a great tool when it first came out.

What I remember most fondly about the Borland stack was how well it abstracted away all the messy Windows 3.x and 95 UI code and made working professionally as a Windows dev much less stressful.

Also, for a time, it totally blew away MS Visual C, although the VCL was hella inconsistent, and that was rather maddening at times.

To be at max productivity you had to scour the web looking for snippets that showed you how to, say, add strings to this widget or draw on that canvas.

The RAD implementation was rather brilliant, and for several years at least blew its main competitor, Visual Basic (ugh) totally out of the water.

Has the Delphi language evolved - i.e. does it use new ideas and has it dropped old ones? Or is that language substantially the same?

Also, why would anyone use Delphi today except for legacy maintenance?

I'd pick Delphi over WPF/Winforms any day. Better cross-platform options, vector-based graphics via FMX, or traditional Windows graphics via the VCL. COM programming couldn't be easier. Performance is good, lots of components readily available, and finally Object Pascal is a joy to program in. Compilation speed comparable to a C# build.

I get the feeling that, just like cockroaches, Delphi will survive a nuclear apocalpyse...

Delphi was the Power Builder killer way back 20 years ago.

Delphi is still the best choice for SQL driven apps

is there something Delphi (I mean RAD IDE) for React? Sorry for stupid question.

There was this good thread about Delphi on HN some years ago:

Delphi – why won't it die? (2013) (stevepeacocke.blogspot.com)

http://stevepeacocke.blogspot.com/2013/05/delphi-why-wont-it...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543