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Comment by sysrpl | Hacker News Reader

Well you have said what I always think. For those familiar C# feels like the next iteration of Delphi, but with curly braces. Both Delphi and Free Pascal haven't stopped though. They've added generics, extension methods, attributes, and many of the other features that have also been added onto C#.

Free Pascal has gone further to add management operators, vector math intrinsics, and improved array features.

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Delphi has those too, and with latest iteration (read May 2020) they added inline variable declaration (which on Free Pascal will raise a syntax error)

Note that inline variable declaration had been discussed at the past by the Free Pascal developers and was rejected by most of them - this is a (rare) case where they decided that they wont follow Delphi. Reasons, IIRC, are mainly due to how weird the syntax is and it feels too un-Pascal-ish to have mixed declarations and code (in Pascal pretty much everything is declared in its own section) and with Pascal supporting nested functions/procedures and the IDE being able to autocomplete variable declarations for you, it is more of a code smell than something necessary.

From what I've read/understood, the reason Delphi folks decided to do this is to allow even better compiler optimization. This way it's easier for optimizer to see the local variable needs to be a CPU registry and no memory access, speeding its performance.

Hm, i guess this depends on the compiler, but if that was the case then first use should be enough to figure out this. I guess classic Delphi had a very simple compiler so perhaps it needs this, but AFAIK modern Delphi has an LLVM backend whose optimizations shouldn't be affected by variable placement.

In any case, i think Free Pascal does have variable lifetime analysis so its optimizations shouldn't need that either.

> with curly braces

...and .NET in tow.

Yeah, FPC can target an absurd collection of systems; can C# handle that level of portability?

Only in the same way as Java can (run the .NET VM) and the GUI story is far less clear.

Early .NET also copied liberally from VCL. The entire System.Windows.Forms namespace, with base classes like Component and Control, feels very familiar to anybody who made GUI apps in Delphi before.

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