For those interested, Free Pascal and Lazarus, the free open source implementation of Delphi, is amazing. It has an active development community and works on most all platforms.
No, it is less than mediocre. It has not kept up at any sufficient pace to other languages and environments. Just a small excerpt because I don't have the nerve to write an exhaustive critique: bignum, first-class functions, generators, lazy lists, lexical scope, macros, namespaces. Single window in Lazarus requires recompilation that errors out in CheckLst.pas instead of being a preference somewhere in a menu.
The other things I understand though. I much prefer Pascal syntax and compilation time, but I have started reaching for c++ these days
Simple begin/end should create a scope, cf. { … } in ES6 or Perl. Instead, to make it work, the programmer has to nest named procedures.
> Namespaces have been supported since 3.0.
Sorry, I did not notice. Apparently it's been available for 5 years, but the standard library or other popular libraries did not adopt the feature.
Also it's open source, so when you are writing code you can actually navigate to the underlying sources and step into everything with the debugger if you want.
Finally, it comes with library support for so much more than Delphi, including Google APIs, FreeType, Cairo, Fuse, and so on.
Oh and it can also build to Java byte code and run in a Java JVM, also to Android.
Did I mention it's free and open source under active development?
Not just the compiler. If the board has enough juice one can run the entire IDE itself on it, therefore developing on the same iron. I've tried Lazarus on old H3 based NanoPIs and slowness aside (microSD, years old board, 1G RAM) it was perfectly usable to write, compile and run code on the same board. Not an ideal condition, still speaks a lot on why Open Source is great. I wish the IDE supported more languages and compilers though, and even a basic port of the LCL and debugger to them would be a huge achievement.
https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ is made by the Free Pascal team, that's the "official" version. It has precompiled binaries to download https://www.lazarus-ide.org/index.php?page=about
https://www.getlazarus.org/ is a different version (but not sure by how much), using download scripts https://www.getlazarus.org/about/