Why would anyone use that over Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)?
Delphi has got inline const syntax. They talk about inline var, but from my Ada programming experience inline const is the real game changer. When there was only local variable block, some stuff was assigned inside loop. This stuff was assigned once per iteration, but since variable is declared outside the loop, it is considered variable. Now, when inside loop, it can be assigned once and made read-only. I have some doubts that Free Pascal is up-to-date with these changes.
Hi-DPI. Did not test, but questionable that Free Pascal got it right.
It's wonderful for reading ten years later and figuring things out.
> Hi-DPI. Did not test, but questionable that Free Pascal got it right.
Free Pascal is the compiler and has nothing to do with Hi-DPI. Lazarus is what you probably have in mind and does Hi-DPI (in fact it can do Hi-DPI even with widgetsets like Gtk2 that themselves do not have support for it).
Don't get me wrong, FreePascal is great, but it hardly has a presence at big corporations.
If they no longer use Delphi, means they have long moved into either Java or .NET.
That is not the case, Free Pascal has improved the language before Delphi and Delphi followed, e.g. FPC added generics before Delphi and more recently it implemented management operators before Delphi.
One big annoyance though is that when Delphi does decide to implement some language feature introduced by Free Pascal they implement it using an incompatible syntax which is petty (at best). FPC then has to support both their own syntax (usually in OBJFPC mode) and Delphi's syntax (usually in DELPHI mode) to let people share code between FPC and Delphi.
My use-case was building a simple USB-stick-portable application for windows and it was great for that.
It's not quite the Delphi experience, but it's close enough that I could see myself using Lazarus for day-to-day development and being fairly productive with it.
https://github.com/ideasawakened/delphi-and-fpc-lazarus-comp...