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It's hard to overstate just how much faster Turbo Pascal was than its competitors. So fast that it was hard to believe it wasn't cheating in some way. And then the resulting program was faster too.

A tour-de-force of its day, and it deserved all the acclimation that it got.

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In my college graphics class (taught by Jack Bresenham, no less) I asked for permission to use the new Borland Turbo C for my class projects. After a quick recompile for the demo (the PC in the classroom wasn't a 80286) I found my code ran a third of the speed of everyone else's, which had been written in Turbo Pascal v4.

And that's how I learned that mature compilers are better than 1.0 release compilers.

Exactly, on the slow processors of the day, the Turbo Pascal compiler absolutely sprinted through the code.

A far cry from today’s complex build systems that take forever to compile a program which can do exactly the same thing.

Even until today, Pascal is still mentioned as language than can be compiled fast (including Go vs Rust debate).

Many years ago, I remember building FPC 2.0 something on a Windows PC (512 MB RAM) and it took no more than 5 minutes.

Delphi, the successor of it still does that. Here is a link to an article about having a real project that contains a bit over a million lines of code. Has a video in it as well, and the comments there also discuss the times regarding Win64 compilation times:

https://www.tmssoftware.com/site/blogold.asp?post=759

https://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html

Indeed, Ctrl-F9 in Turbo Pascal was almost instantaneous, whereas the same in Turbo C++ would let you read through the list of files in the popup window as they were processed.

It's biggest downside was that it was limited to producing 64KB .COM files until version 4 or 5.

This is not TP compiler limit. It's format and memory model limit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_file#DOS_binary_format

EXE (aka MZ) is using other memory models

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20200728-00/?p=10...

That's what I was saying. Turbo Pascal didn't support generating EXE files until version 4.

AFAIK it was initially made to run on CP/M 8-bit systems, that 64 KB limit was a consequence.

I know I've used it on CP/M first.

It was really, really fast.

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