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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised to see Delphi still getting pretty solid use in some circles. I had no idea.

Talked to a dev who was an advocate for it some years back.

If you build for a small number of professional users with a known target platform and you know how to solve distribution, then RAD tools (or any platforms supporting desktop targets) are the best choice and they offer superior UX compared to browser-based apps.

I myself now prefer to build admin tools on Java/Swing, because it’s much faster and easier than building a web app (Claude Code does that job quite well). Delphi probably offers even better dev.speed/quality/UX.

Yeah, getting a webapp up and running for small amount of users is tedious. Either complicated install or permanent hosting cost and permanent cost for keeping maintained. A desktop tool has a lot less security vectors as it's all local.

Of course there is electron, but that has its own set of complications.

For simple tools RAD is great.

Since Firemonkey draws on Skia anyway, they could also provide something similar to Flutter/WASM.

I love the Flutter/WASM idea, but cannot get warm with the widget in widget approach flutter uses. Having a designtool like Delphi's would be nice.

Have you tried Vaadin? It's like writing a Swing application that compiles to the web. Or at least it was when I used it last, about 7 years ago.

It’s the COBOL of the 1990s.

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