Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available

If you tried a 2005 technology, don't be surprised with 2005 customer service.

The GUI builder was more powerful than the one provided by VS, from what I remember (20+ years ago since I've dabbled in it). I really miss that era. In certain circles you could open an application and almost get a sense as to who built it due to the craftsmanship / UI / attention to detail in the placement of the elements in the application, etc.

Delphi had a powerful and easy to use GUI editor in the early 2000s, much less of a hassle compared to building software with Windows' own C++ API.

Even before, Turbo Pascal was fairly appreciated in some circles (e.g. demomaking), quite productive and nice to use!

I noticed this as well in the 2000s. Stuff like WinHex which I was pretty sure then was written using Delphi. Was into RE during those days, so I used to poke around the internals of software just for fun

> I had to give them my email just to download it

But why? Just throw some garbage - a temporary email - at them if they so insist.

This is the really annoying part.

Delphi's predecessor if not Delphi itself was $99 (Turbo Pascal).

Lazarus does not support BPL. Android and iOS support are under question. Free Pascal devs for many years did not look into Ada, and looked into C++ more, and that made Free Pascal ugly. Delphi did not look into Ada either, but they looked into .NET instead, and that made Delphi not as great, but better than Free Pascal. Anything is better than C++. Delphi delivered controlled types, that was IIRC for many years in top 10 feature requests on Quality Central, until QC was purged. They call it "managed records".

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.

The IDE experience, they are the ones driving the language evolution, FreePascal follows, and the industry that cares about Object Pascal, usually only cares because of Delphi.

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.

I use both for desktop applications but as an IDE and for debugging in particular Lazarus is behind Delphi.

How good is Lazarus nowadays? Haven't taken a look for 20 years so this is a genuine question.

Me too! So I was curious and watched What Happened to Borland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwkoaPl31Dw

After Pascal Niklaus Wirth designed Modula-2 and then Oberon which is even tidier. Oberon is both smaller and more capable than both of its predecessors.

https://miasap.se/obnc/oberon-report.html

Not sure if you mean Pascal or Delphi here. The Visual Component Library (VCL) was hands down the easiest way to build windows GUIs, no knowledge of the Win API required. But if you did need to do it, it really wasn't hard to do.

The irony is that now in 2026 we have COBOL's revenge with Markdown driven programming.

Doesn't get more verbose than that.

Pascal was comparably clean, but Delphi library is quite messy. SysUtils is about local time, exceptions, floating number formatting and OS error handling. SyncObjs are about synchronization which is very good. But TThread resides in Classes, together with streams, serialization, base components, lists and other containers. Rapidly created form controllers are implementation of god object anti-pattern.

> And calling win API was a horror

This is not easy matter in any language. And I called Android API from Delphi. Still quite an adventure

On the contrary, calling Windows APIs was easier than in C, no import libraries required, just declare what you need and there you go.

Will you happily pay for Ada IDE? Another part of your proposal is already true. Ada has free compiler and libraries. Paid IDE is all that remains, that's how things work, right?

I have used Beyond Compare for 20 years, and as far as I know, it has always been and still is written in Delphi. Quest Software, maker of TOAD for Oracle was also a big Delphi shop for many years. Not sure if they still are.

In Germany, Delphi columns are still rather common on the .NET developers magazine.

I'm not sure if it still does, but Delphi definitely used to support .NET.

One can legally use Community Edition until income hits some limit. Paid edition can be bought and just used without updates.

> use .NET, which is $0

But tracing garbage collection needs 5x more available RAM than used RAM. Native conservative applications introduce memory fragmentation, estimated as 2:1 available:used. That gives 2.5x smaller memory footprint of native apps, and RAM prices matter lately.

Cross platform support exists but works by having Windows as the main development environment than then cross compiling into the varios platforms.

Yes there is a community version for C++ Builder as well.

Nuh-uh. http://www.isdelphidead.com/