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Comment by BruceEel | Hacker News Reader

Delphi! Purchased ver.3.0 back in the day, it was excellent.

So, who's using Delphi in prod anno 2021?

I am not writing Delphi code anymore (but did that for close to 20 years professionally), but there are many artifacts still up and running and would probably run for next few decades if not longer.

1) I've started my programming career by creating new user interface for device that measures properties of metal joins on [BIG] machines [1]. It is used by many mining and energy companies. First version of this device was created somewhere in 70s so I guess this new one will last for many decades to come.

2) There was a time when every company created its own ERP software and I was hired to help maintain 500k lines of code monster that is used by fair chunk of construction companies in Austria. All the accounting, warehouse, quoting, payroll and what not was based on top of old Paradox database. Custom hacks were deployed to make sure we fit everything into 64kb of index space and I've got massive headaches trying to make work decades old database in networking mode. Another fun year was at the time when Vista changed memory layout and you sometimes crash everything because of memory location that was meant to be for printers is now occupied by sound stuff and you've touched protected memory. Anyway as far as I know this system is up and running, counting numbers, printing invoices, work orders and quotes all days long.

[1] https://www.popsci.com/resizer/meUXbu78Po3bGHtIFIaRTwBsLqg=/...

1) Big machine awesomeness!! Respect++ to you.

2) Funny, I did a fair bit of freelancing at construction companies back in the early 90's, mostly using Paradox (3.x DOS, if I'm not wrong) and mostly helping out with the insane reporting required for taking part in public tenders. I still have nightmares and have not gone back to freelancing since then.

Oh yeah, the amount of reports are insane. There were more than 200 different reports implemented in the tool and most of them have been customized for each separate customer. It was spaghetti bowl of half baked custom DSL, config files and what not.

I'm part of a 4 man team that maintains a 1.3 million loc application in the PropTech industry. It's been jazzed u with a WPF front end I can compile all 1.3 million loc in 11 seconds on my work laptop using Delphi Xe7.

The rest of the form has gone web but moving 1.3 million LOC would be a 10 year project we estimate. So it's not happening. Customers love it and thats what matters.

There are a lot of companies using Delphi in some very cool apps. There has been a lot of them published recently on the updated blog site at Embarcadero.

https://blogs.embarcadero.com/category/showcase/

We’ve got a 20 year Delphi code base for a robotic product that we need to update the functionality and simplify the UI. If I could have 2 Delphi devs to take on this project I’d be delighted. We’ll probably just use a .net cover though.

I've using TurboPascal from 1990 till 2010. Still love it!

Willing to help. Drop me mail to peter at mobiliodevelopment dot com

Sure, happy to work on it. Last day rate was $1200/day

I started a project in 2006 with Delphi

I still maintain it

But I ported it to FreePascal/Lazarus, since I did not want to buy newer versions

On what platform(s) do you run Lazarus if I may ask? Does it work reliably for you? I've tried Lazarus a while ago on macOS and the out-of-the-box experience seemed a bit flaky, unable to compile (or run) a simple writeln('hello world') throwing obscure linking errors. (Granted XCode occasionally gives me the same experience! Mostly because of code signing issues.)

Invoking fpc from Terminal worked OK.

On Linux

It is ok. On Linux nothing is really reliable

Not in prod, but I do occasionally use the community version.

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