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Comment by MrGilbert | Hacker News Reader

I had to giggle recently when I heard "Delphi is dead". It's not. And I don't think it ever will, because, both as a language and work environment, it is quite powerful.

It has pretty low entry barriers, and is pretty capable. When I used it (as a hobbiest, during Delphi 5 and Delphi 7 times), it had a superb tooling, and a really efficient compiler. Everything "just worked". It's now 15 - 20 years ago, when we created really tiny Windows exe files. A notepad.exe clone in only 23kb size - with no external dependencies at all, just using pure Windows32 API and Delphi. These where truely fun times.

Miss them some times.

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Totally agreed. I was fortunate enough to start real programming with Delphi 5 (and then 7). Nowadays I know dozens of languages and frameworks but nothing comes close to the experience of quickly prototyping apps that at the end looked good, didn't need any dependencies and were super-small.

Another benefit was that it was possible to interoperate with low-level Win32 API and the enormous component library provided by third-party authors.

> Another benefit was that it was possible to interoperate with low-level Win32 API and the enormous component library provided by third-party authors.

Yes, absolutely. I'm happy to see that "Project JEDI" is still around[1].

[1]: https://github.com/project-jedi

I use Delphi on a daily basis to code internally-used marketing automation tools. There is nothing that comes remotely close to it in terms of ease of debugging and overall productivity. There are better languages/tools to use for public-facing products, but for "I just need it to run" type projects, it works flawlessly.

> It has pretty low entry barriers

Cost being the obvious large one.

Every time I’ve had an inkling of interest in Delphi, I pop by the website and nope out within a few minutes after finding the pricing page.

There's a free Community edition, which you can use as a hobbyist, or as a company until you reach a revenue limit.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter

For the commercial versions, AFAIK overall it's less than Visual Studio, but when amortized over a couple of years. Slightly different pricing model so trickier to compare.

The community edition is relatively new. Before that, there was some watered down version for $199 (if I'm remembering correctly). Back when I looked into it there was no way I could afford or justify spending that kind of money on a language that I may not even like or want to continue learning.

That's not how I remember it. An empty statically linked VCL GUI application used to weigh about 700 KB. Just as stupid edgy kids usually do, we were looking at other "C++ applications" a dozen KBs in size and were ranting about Delphi being so bloated and terrible. Of course, it was due to them being built on top of pure Win32 API, or being dynamically linked to a similar "bloated" runtime.

It's not like we had an internet connection to learn from.

At least that's how I learned the difference between static and dynamic linking.

Depends on the Delphi version. Delphi 2 (what i used and still use sometimes) creates a VCL app at around 200KB. Later versions added a bit, but i think it wasn't until after Delphi 7 that sizes ballooned.

However i have a feeling that MrGilbert refers to using the Windows API directly without VCL in which case you can create very small executables.

Yes, exactly - sorry I didn't clarify. There were folks out there who created stripped down versions of Systems32 classes, so you had a basic skeleton running.

Maybe I should write a progam like that, just for the fun of it. It still works nowadays. I might even get away with FreePascal. I'll give it a try. :)

Yeah it should work. A few years ago i reimplemented in Free Pascal most of the OWL 1.0 API that shipped with Turbo Pascal for Windows and you can create some very small executables with it:

https://i.imgur.com/bFGIVSU.png

(that 82KB executable uses almost all of the API's functionality, including type registration, dynamic instantiation and object streaming)

Though i never did anything with it, i mainly wrote it for fun. The OWL 1.0 API isn't really that better than using raw Win32 :-P. But perhaps now that Free Pascal added support for Win16 in the trunk i could port it there.

> as a hobbiest

Grammar note: "hobbyist". "-ist" is the suffix for, "A person who does this thing"; "-est" is the suffix for changing an adjective into a superlative: "Yours is hobby, his is hobbier, mine is the hobbiest."

Non-native speaker here, so.. thanks for the input! I appreciate that. :)

Agreed. I still use Delphi (7) to write Windows apps (and Lazarus to port them to Linux MacOS). Not everything is web based.

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