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Has the Delphi language evolved - i.e. does it use new ideas and has it dropped old ones? Or is that language substantially the same? Also, why would anyone u

• ak39 8y ago
  There have been a few syntactic enhancements over the last 10 years or so. Generics for example. Recently they have also added inline variable declaration (you don't need to put all vars in a function at the top anymore). But these don't really matter to me so much. I think Emb did this as response to "Oh Delphi language is archaic - Java has this, C# has that ..." I still use Delphi for new projects by default. Static linking of libraries into one distributable dll or exe makes it very appealing. If I wanted this in another IDE, I'd have to use VC++. Also, Delphi's VCL, a near comprehensive wrapper of Win32 (its true strength) and native support for IDLs like COM makes it easy to roll out working software sooner. I'm currently writing a natively compiled Excel Addin with heavy use of TThread - a multithreading VCL class for the Windows platform. Lightning fast compile & build speeds will spoil you.
• magicalhippo 8y ago
  Yes the language has evolved, but due to backwards compatibility not much as been dropped. New things include operator overloading of records (structs), compile-time generics and closures/anonymous functions. Using them you can write code that looks quite different from old Turbo Pascal days. As for why using it except legacy, yeah... tough question. Well if your target is a Win32-only GUI application, then I don't know much that beats the VCL in getting things done. But that's a narrow niche these days.