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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

The great thing about Object Pascal is that, unlike C or C++, it was designed to compile really fast. Pascal units completely remove the burden of C++ header files. In the end, you are almost as productive as with a dynamic language and you still have compiled code. I haven't seen another language to get even close to the balance achieved by Delphi in this respect.

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Have you heard of Nimrod? (http://nimrod-lang.org)

Compile-time wise it is very impressive (the compiler which is self-hosting compiles in under 30 seconds on my computer). It also resembles Delphi and Pascal in some ways and I am personally very productive with it.

Even C++ compilers (except gcc) mostly compile themselves in under 30 seconds. How is that impressive ?

Delphi compiles source code almost as fast as it can read it from disk. Megabytes of sourcecode per second on a 486.

Which C++ compiler compiles itself in under 30 seconds on a typical desktop? Clang takes at least a minute or two even at -j40...

While not Delphi, I really like it and I am playing with it now, thanks for mentioning it.

Nimrod is great. It is definitely inspired by Delphi/ObjectPascal. I keep trying to come up with an excuse to use it for a project.

Oberon-F on classic Mac OS was really productive, and I imagine its descendant, BlackBox Component Pascal on Windows is so as well: one of the great features was the ability to extend the IDE while running it: you could compile an extension and test it in seconds. Wirth knows how to design efficient languages and systems, and his students (most of the founders of Oberon microsystems, the developers of BlackBox, were such) carry on the tradition.

D perhaps?

It's also designed to compile fast and to native code. Maybe it's not as mature and robust as Delphi yet though.

I fondly remember installing a Pascal interpreter card in my Apple //e for UCSD Pascal - a branch of Pascal running in a VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal

Lua, LuaJIT provide the same sort of kick, in my opinion. The language supports easy integration with pretty much any syslib, and well .. its a fine way of doing a lot of things. Anyway, its my '21st Century' Delphi, anyway .. haven't written much Delphi code since the late 90's, but I'm sure glad its still around and kicking.

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