16 ms·

26 Years of Delphi

197 points by mustafabisic1 6y ago

albertzeyer 6y ago
In any discussion about Delphi, you really should also mention Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/). It's more mature (i.e. more cross platform) than Delphi, and fully open source. It's based on the Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) (https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/) (also open source).
- FpUser 6y ago
  It is more cross platform but integrated debugger kind of sucks. I am doing some project for Raspberry Pi 4 and had to resort to debugPrint() as on some breakpoints it reports gdb error and terminates debugging.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    Indeed, i always have issues with gdb and Lazarus (under Windows) with the debugger randomly deciding to stop working or not stepping through code (even with zero optimizations) or other stuff. However the new debugger written specifically for Free Pascal seems to work much better - just not available everywhere ATM.
- justin66 6y ago
  Has anyone published a good comparison of the two compilers building the same project? It’d be interesting to know how compile times compare.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    The original Delphi compiler which was in use until some versions ago (and might still be available, dunno) was much faster than Free Pascal while producing more or less the same quality code (in terms of performance) but could only target Windows. Free Pascal targets a bunch of other CPUs and OSes though. I haven't tried any of the recent versions, but AFAIK they're based on LLVM so i'd expect compilation times to have went up but produced executables to be a bit faster. FWIW Free Pascal's developers have mentioned at the past that fast compiler performance isn't really something that they care much about (though in practice FPC is among the faster compilers, just not as fast as Delphi used to be).
    - justin66 6y ago
      > FWIW Free Pascal's developers have mentioned at the past that fast compiler performance isn't really something that they care much about That's an interesting evolution. It had a lot of nice features, but compile time was the only thing about Delphi that was really magical.
      - badsectoracula 6y ago
        Well, Free Pascal was never as fast as Delphi and i doubt its feature set would allow it to be as fast anyway. Delphi only supported a single platform for a single CPU for the largest majority of its lifetime whereas Free Pascal supported a ton of different CPUs and platforms while also adding support for a variety of different Pascal dialects at the same time and often extending the language beyond what you'd see in Delphi - all that adds up quickly. Still, as i wrote, in practice FPC is quite fast. Lazarus itself is almost two million lines of code and yet it compiles and links in seconds.
- gramie 6y ago
  "It's more mature" Usually that implies that bugs and rough patches have been ironed out. I would have to say that Delphi is far more polished than Lazarus. Not that I'm complaining about Lazarus, it's an amazing accomplishment and I play around with it every now and then to see how far it's come.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    Well... in a perfect universe where bad decisions are never made, sure. But a few years after the turn of the century someone at Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/whatever decided to rewrite the IDE while chasing .NET when under a company that by that time had completely lost any interest in development tools. I've only tried the trial/free Delphi versions sporadically and TBH 'polished' isn't something i'd use to describe them. Then again neither is something i'd use to describe Lazarus (which i'm using much more often), however that is for completely different reasons.
dsparkman 6y ago
Delphi, ah the memories. I use to make a fair amount of money in the late 90s making shareware applications with Delphi. It was the most productive I have ever been as a developer. But, the world moved to web fairly rapidly, so I had to move on to the web.
- statictype 6y ago
  What were your apps?
  - dsparkman 6y ago
    I had Spinel Clean and Tidy that let you clean-up your registry and various temp files that were left all over the place back in the Win95 era. Also Spinel ScreenPik which was a screen capture utility.
xony 6y ago
embarcadero , wondering why they couldn't retain the original name borland? .. it was a nice platform , cant afford subscription model so moved on to open source technologies.
BruceEel 6y ago
Delphi! Purchased ver.3.0 back in the day, it was excellent. So, who's using Delphi in prod anno 2021?
- dejv 6y ago
  I am not writing Delphi code anymore (but did that for close to 20 years professionally), but there are many artifacts still up and running and would probably run for next few decades if not longer. 1) I've started my programming career by creating new user interface for device that measures properties of metal joins on [BIG] machines [1]. It is used by many mining and energy companies. First version of this device was created somewhere in 70s so I guess this new one will last for many decades to come. 2) There was a time when every company created its own ERP software and I was hired to help maintain 500k lines of code monster that is used by fair chunk of construction companies in Austria. All the accounting, warehouse, quoting, payroll and what not was based on top of old Paradox database. Custom hacks were deployed to make sure we fit everything into 64kb of index space and I've got massive headaches trying to make work decades old database in networking mode. Another fun year was at the time when Vista changed memory layout and you sometimes crash everything because of memory location that was meant to be for printers is now occupied by sound stuff and you've touched protected memory. Anyway as far as I know this system is up and running, counting numbers, printing invoices, work orders and quotes all days long. [1] https://www.popsci.com/resizer/meUXbu78Po3bGHtIFIaRTwBsLqg=/2068x1552/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-bonnier.s3.amazonaws.com/public/MTUGSVPHBB22CKTZETTB42BCIE.jpg https://www.popsci.com/resizer/meUXbu78Po3bGHtIFIaRTwBsLqg=/...
  - BruceEel 6y ago
    1) Big machine awesomeness!! Respect++ to you. 2) Funny, I did a fair bit of freelancing at construction companies back in the early 90's, mostly using Paradox (3.x DOS, if I'm not wrong) and mostly helping out with the insane reporting required for taking part in public tenders. I still have nightmares and have not gone back to freelancing since then.
    - dejv 6y ago
martin_a 6y ago
I think I've posted it before, but I'll repeat myself nevertheless: Delphi was my first contact with programming. I was probably 13 or 14 years old and had no idea what I was doing, but I could resize the windows, add items to lists, change the color of Strings and place buttons and stuff like this. So, _obviously_ I needed the Delphi 6 Enterprise edition which a friend had (pirated of course) and gave it to me on one of those really cheap CD-R with that distinctive plastic smell. One of the first "real programs" we wrote was something to read sensor data via the parallel port. It was for a school project where a belt had to move and then stop, once the light barrier would sense something. We killed lots of parallel ports in doing that, because we just didn't knew how to do it. Didn't really write anything more useful at that time, but it showed me that there's a world behind what we see and know as "programs". Maybe it laid some fundations in my brain, who knows. Every time I see Delphi pop up I think I should probably have a look at it. But I'm a web monkey now. Lost for everything good, but I like to think back of the 14 year old me. Better times.
- nezirus 6y ago
  My experience was very similar to yours, playing around with components and forms on Delphi 3; But in addition to that I've managed to learn some assembly with Delphi (asm blocks), go figure. And the speed of the compiler on my venerable Pentium MMX 166MHz!!! (Sad looks towards my Rust build on a 100x more powerful computer :-( )
- binwiederhier 6y ago
  This could have been written by me. I loved Delphi and learned how to write software using Delphi 5. We got a cheap copy from school so I didn't have to pirate it. I still have that printout of the class hierarchy of the standard library and the CD ROM. I loved Delphi and I'll be forever grateful for the lessons I've learned.
- loa_in_ 6y ago
  My beginnings were Turbo Pascal and Delphi. I guess I got spoiled because I never found an IDE where GUI design was do intuitive and easy afterwards
statictype 6y ago
Delphi was great. I remember downloading it (pirated obviously) over a 14k connection. It took like a day. The killer feature was that it could build stand lone executables with no runtime. On one hand I really miss those days. On the other hand, what we have today is far superior. Its a great time to be alive for a kid who wants to learn how to program.
- kwanbix 6y ago
  For desktop? I am not sure what we have is superior. Unless you count, which was designed by the same guy who did Delphi.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    We might not have better commercial tools for building pixel-perfect UIs for apps that are going to run on a narrow range of devices in terms of capabilities and display sizes. We've got better F/OSS tools for, well, everything else, desktop or otherwise, than the commercial tools of that time, though.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  From my perspective, the modern web is mostly a regression: subscriptions or advertising everywhere, frustrating tools for building UIs, etc.
  - statictype 6y ago
    You don't have to download a pirated IDE for starters. There is a wealth of good open source tools and content.
- nirav72 6y ago
  yep. This is exactly what attracted me to Delphi. Did a lot of Pascal dev in college with TP. Then tried out VB 3.0 for windows dev. Hated VB because of the performance and having to include the VB runtime. Delphi created a single standalone executable and it was fast. Back in those days, if you wanted close to C/C++ performance without having to learn or deal with the complexities, Delphi was the next best thing.
kolinko 6y ago
Ah delphi, earned some of my first money as a student doing two awesome projects in Delphi that worked for the next 10 years... I still haven’t found anything with such a good interface builder (Xcode comes close, but it’s still worse imho)
- whoisthemachine 6y ago
  The C# WinForms UI builder is a nice ripoff of the Delphi UI builder.
  - msh 6y ago
    Its not really a ripoff as C# and Delphi is designed by the same person.
  - nirav72 6y ago
    ahh not really. VB and powerbuilder UI builders predate Delphi and Csharp.
    - vram22 6y ago
      Yes, that is why when Delphi 1 (or 2?) was announced, it was billed as the VB killer. That never happened, I guess, though it did become somewhat successful. I used both VB and Delphi some, in work and personal projects. Preferred Delphi by far.
      - nirav72 6y ago
        Oh I definately agree, Delphi was a better dev tool compared to VB at the time. No runtime needed to be shipped, standalone fully compiled executable alone was the killer feature.
simion314 6y ago
I did not used Delphi but did a a few Windows apps with C# and Windows Forms int he past, I am curious in the present day for Windows only dev what would be the advantage of using Delphi over C# with VS or Intellij.
- marcocantu 6y ago
  Delphi produces native applications with no dependency, offers components encapsulating Windows APIs, COM, WinRT -- and a great native platform experience. Binary code with no dependency = real xcopy deployment, small deployment, memory and CPU efficiency. It's like writing in VC++ in terms of power, but visual and high level in terms of dev experience
  - simion314 6y ago
    Thanks for response, I agree with parts of your response but I do not understand what you mean with "components encapsulating Windows APIs, COM, WinRT" in comparison with .Net , I mean .Net also wraps the majority of the win32 and other APIs.
    - candiodari 6y ago
      Yes but the resulting .exe depends on like 20 installed .dlls. For starters, the .NET runtime, which will fundamentally limit where your app runs. Second updates in those underlying dlls and runtimes may prevent your app from working correctly. So if the customer doesn't have or screws up their .NET installation, your app stops running. Getting a Delphi app to stop running on windows through bad sysadminning ... I haven't seen it done. Think of C# apps like java .jar applications. They end in .exe, but they're not, not really. And at least .jar makes it a lot clearer it needs a JRE to run, and it's cross platform to boot.
      - simion314 6y ago
        Your reply is not what I asked. I know the issues with the .Net dependency, like user has 4.0 but the app depends on 4.5 or similar problems. But this is not a big issue and you can if you want bundle the Java or .Net runtime inside the application. Anyway I was aware of this binary size / memory usage difference in favor of unmanaged code, my question was something else, if you can clarify that or admit it was an error would be great.
soenkeliebau 6y ago
This article made me feel really, really old!
bluedino 6y ago
I loved Pascal and I did most of my DOS programming with it until DJGPP. But for Windows in jumped right to Visual C++. All because Delphi was “dying”, at least in popularity. So I never got to give it a chance.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
One of my competitors used Delphi to write their software. One part of the software ran under the print spooler so when 64-bit Windows came along they were stuffed as the 64-bit version of Delphi was slow to arrive. I did quite well out of that.
Gehinnn 6y ago
I remember when I turned 16 and all I wanted as birthday present was a license for Delphi 2009. If I remember correctly, it costed more than €1k at that time. Obviously I got something else. When I learned about the free Visual Studio Express, I switched to .Net development and never used Delphi again. This experience shaped me and all tools I will ever create will be available for free to students and kids.
- rahoulb 6y ago
  Thats because Microsoft hired Anders Hjeilsberg, architect of Delphi, to create the .net platform and the C# language. And in the process signing the death warrant for Borland (who created Delphi). The rumour was Microsoft's own staff preferred using Delphi to their own tools, which is why they hired Hjeilsberg.
  - Gehinnn 6y ago
    The killing feature was not .Net for me, but the free and fully featured IDE. I hated to type out every public declaration twice in the Delphi 5 IDE I got from school. I remember that I hated the startup time of Visual Studio though. In Delphi 5, I typed invalid syntax to create a temporary bookmark: When I pressed F5 to compile the project, I immediately jumped to it. This was entirely impossible for C# programs.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    First of all, Anders was hired to create J++. Secondly, he only joined after been asked multiple times by ex-Borland colleges when he felt it wasn't his place any longer at Borland. https://youtu.be/0g-IjyFnrAM https://youtu.be/0g-IjyFnrAM
  - andi999 6y ago
    Borland killed itself by switching to services.
jamesdhutton 6y ago
When it first came out, Delphi was streets ahead of the main Microsoft options available at the time, namely VB and Visual C++. I remember it with great affection.
Pelic4n 6y ago
Delphi is as old as Python, damn.
- davidhbolton 6y ago
  Even older. It's the Windows follow on to Dos Turbo Pascal which existed from 1984.
jhbadger 6y ago
A lot of this was good, reminding us that the world of 1995 when Delphi was first released was quite different from now. But the idea that "The video games industry was in its early days" in 1995 is a bit of a weird assertion. So the 8-bit and 16-bit eras didn't count?
- markus_zhang 6y ago
  Yeah that line also hit me as a bit weird. Even when we count the PC game industry it was pretty mature at that time already.
kristaps 6y ago
> When Delphi was released in 1005 Lovely typo, although it undeniably feels as if Delphi has been around forever.
- marcocantu 6y ago
  Ops, fixed, yes somehow funny
- vram22 6y ago
  I guess that should be 1995. Same year as Java 1, FWIW.
  - vram22 6y ago
    Used that from year 1, too, for some years.
captainmuon 6y ago
Unfortunately, I've never used Delphi. But the article makes me nostalgic for the old school Borland style GUIs with icons on the buttons and stippled backgrounds. Or the CTL3D style which was really modern at the end of the Win 3.1 era.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Compared to developing an application for the web those Borland interfaces were wicked fast and pretty clever. Extremely productive.
kwanbix 6y ago
Sadly it was killed by so many bad decisions from Borland. It was really a great tool. Maybe if Microsoft had bought it instead of "just hiring" Anders Hejlsberg?
- barrkel 6y ago
  Anti-trust. In fact Microsoft invested in Borland as part of a settlement for predatory hiring, IIRC.
nottorp 6y ago
26 years ago Delphi was pretty affordable and you didn't need a lawyer to protect yourself from the licensor too :)
elvis70 6y ago
I remember using Delphi 1 on a 386 under Windows 3.1 and watching and even listening to the GUI reloading from the swap file component by component. I had enough RAM but I think the Windows memory manager was not great. Today, I'd throw the PC out the window, but at the time, there was something reassuring about it. But maybe I'm embellishing my memories.
r0b05 6y ago
Out here in the battlegrounds of web development, this article makes me miss the safe cocoon of Delphi and Windows development.
u678u 6y ago
BTW from memory Delphi was named as such as it was the main route to Oracle which was the most common enterprise database. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi
jacquesm 6y ago
I still occasionally come across Delphi in use today, and even new projects are started using it as the core technology. It definitely wouldn't be my choice but it is interesting to see how productive people can be with this even now.
flaie 6y ago
I remember when I discovered Delphi, it was in circa 2001-2002. At the time I was 16-17 and knew how to program with PHP (I was modding phpBB at the time), tried with PHP-GTK to build user interfaces, but found it not that great. Then I discovered Delphi, already knew some parts of Pascal. But what a gem it was, in a matter of days I felt like I was totally proficient, could create windows, manage resize, add components, tweak colors, run background tasks, want a listview? just drag it. Need a HTTP call? drag the component (can't remember the name), connect onclick to it, and you're done. I recall the website torry.net with plenty of libraries to download. I also tried Borland C++, but wasn't good enough with it, and as I remember discovering that even DevC++ was written with Delphi. Simply figuring out it was good enough for me. I created so much things with it until like 2004-2005 I think, like a complete terminal on my Windows, re implementing standard commands all within Delphi. Wrote some games companion for Rainbow Six and RavenShield [1], fetching statistics and available servers, scanning games to find your friends, downloaded thousand times. An alt-tab which worked with Quake III that at the time was also downloaded hundreds of times, a companion to The All Seeing Eye (server browsing), a small Photoshop tool where I learnt how to create my own filters like Gaussian blurs and so on [2], key mapping profiles for plenty of games by modifying INI files [3], a code formatter inside DevC++ [4], ... I have lost all of my source code (didn't knew how to backup things at the time), still have some binaries and screenshots for posterity I remember this period with nostalgia and great passion. Thank you Delphi for the good times and all the fun, this is when I really knew what I wanted to do after school. [1] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160435-948cd786-2d0c-4641-b56c-00104e53a167.37.res.jpg https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160435-948cd7... [2] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160351-cc03e033-b5c0-4c7c-85bb-2d0f7a8b300f.37.res.jpg https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160351-cc03e0... [3] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160401-712b1fa8-88a7-4e3b-9ae3-b6873cf55694.37.res.jpg https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160401-712b1f... [4] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160338-6f856cae-afa9-4e13-8084-c00ab633942b.37.res.jpg https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160338-6f856c... && https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160330-cc512a98-cb8b-4532-a089-6761344cf58f.37.res.jpg https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160330-cc512a...
midrus 6y ago
Great memories. Delphi was my first programming language. I learned it from programming magazines I used to buy when I was about 17 years old or so. My dad had a small supermarket at that time, and I remember the first useful program I built in my life was a small application to scan discount coupons he used to accept. Those coupons had a barcode and I discovered the hand scanners we used were just doing keyboard emulation. So I wrote an application in Delphi that would allow my father to scan all coupons at the end of the day and then print a sheet with a table of quantities, amounts, subtotals and totals of the money he had in coupons... something he was doing by hand before this. He was so happy with this program. The program itself was very, very, very shitty, but it worked well for him. For example, at that point I didn't even knew that arrays existed, so all the logic and multiplication was done manually, like label43 = textInput25 * textInput24 * 0.1. I also remember that, in order to send the form to the printer, I wrote code to go control by control, change the background to white, the border to black, calling something like form.printForm() and then restoring all the colors. This caused a horrible flickering when printing... but hey... it worked!! The best memories I have was that probably, this was the first time I had that "feeling" of having built something useful to somebody. And certainly the best moment was when one of his suppliers who also accepted those coupons asked us for a copy of the program. Great times. Some days I feel like I've never have built something as useful again since then .
- bm98 6y ago
  >The best memories I have was that probably, this was the first time I had that "feeling" of having built something useful to somebody. And certainly the best moment was when one of his suppliers who also accepted those coupons asked us for a copy of the program. Great times. And then you go off to college, and one day the program stops working because of one problem or another, and they call you in the middle of studying for final exams, and that's when you learned about technical support and technical debt and all the things that make programming less fun! Some people have recurring dreams in which they show up to school or work in their pajamas... my recurring dream is that some program I wrote in high school is still being used twenty years later, and they come calling because something broke...
  - 6y ago
flrizzato 6y ago
Doing backend apps with Delphi is very fun and productive!
- imagine99 6y ago
  Care to share some examples of what you're doing? I'm always curious...
mikewarot 6y ago
I started in Turbo Pascal, and migrated to Delphi when it came along, it was cheap enough that I had the pro version up until I moved into SysAdmin. Now that I want to dive back into production programming, Delphi has basically priced itself out of existence for me. Lazarus is a good alternative, a bit buggy, but at least I can afford it. Eventually I'll probably implement a Pascal layer on top of Racket. As far as straight up GUI toolkits go, there's no better tool than Delphi. I doubt I'll ever have something that powerful again.
- mobilio 6y ago
  Mine first TP was version 5.0 or 5.5. I still love how fast was IDE then. When TP (or BP) was released i was still love old versions because they can compile to RAM, while new one only can compile to disk.
- e12e 6y ago
  > Eventually I'll probably implement a Pascal layer on top of Racket. https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal
- tomjen3 6y ago
  May I suggest windows presentation framework? It is very different in thought to Delphi but it would be my candidate for most powerful GUI toolkit, even more than Delphi. With the obvious proviso that for most the time of the Desktop computer has passed, so the most powerful GUI framework might be Vue or React at this point.
  - imagine99 6y ago
    > for most the time of the Desktop computer has passed Might I respectfully disagree? Whenever I walk into a business, especially a larger one with open floor offices (and I admit, it has been a while, for obvious reasons), I see exactly one thing: Rows of desktop PCs (incl. laptop). Not tablets. Not smartphones. Desktop PCs (whether they run VDI or aren't much bigger than a CD case is immaterial). I'd strongly argue that most productive work on an electronic device is still performed at desktops (or laptops, which in this case are the same thing). I get that when it comes to consumers, mobile is king and all that. That might be true. But for businesses, the choice of developing an internal tool web-based rather than cranking it out in Delphi and copying the exe on a network share, is simply down to the availability of developers. Not many decision-makers today still know about Delphi as a viable alternative (even for web and mobile development btw!) and when you can get much more developers at reasonable rates for React projects and don't have to fork over thousands to an unsympathetic company called Idera, well, it's almost a no-brainer. But I'd still argue that you can get more done in an afternoon with Delphi than with Vue if you start with a blank slate - and at a fraction of keystrokes, too! ;-) ~> change my mind :-)
deleted 6y ago
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ruph123 6y ago
Whenever I heard “Delphi”, I thought it was an ancient programming language that older colleagues used to mention (“... <anecdote> ... many moons ago, back when I used to program Delphi.”). But so Delphi really is/was a GUI editor? Something like an ancient Qt Creator? And according to Wikipedia it is not even a language but is using “Object Pascal”. Wild. I wonder why this never comes up when I read a out cross platform GUI frameworks...
- jonp888 6y ago
  The lack of any free or hobbyist-priced editions when everybody else was giving away their tooling for free more or less killed it off. It is still beloved by it's acolytes and there are a handful people out there who learned Delphi 20 years ago and stubbornly refuse to use anything else. It's an uphill struggle though because no-one releases a Delphi SDK for anything anymore.
  - markus_zhang 6y ago
    Just curious why don't they do that now? Like a community edition. I guess that's because there are still some licensed editions out there and they are OK with the $$ they bring in. But what about the future?
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      They do do that: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-download/ https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow... It's just way, way late to the party, so most guests left :(
      - markus_zhang 6y ago
        Oh that's so sad. Personally I never used Pascal/Delphi because I was barred from using a computer (because my father thought I'd just play games instead of learning anything useful) until late into the 90s and I was not in a CS major, but my father used it extensively as he worked as Math-turned-CS professor in a University and Pascal was pretty popular at the time. I also read the book about Borland vs Microsoft and kind of feeling sorry that Pascal/Delphi didn't make it. Just a question, say I wanna develop a 2d map editor for Windows 10, does Delphi win over C# in the sense of RAD?
kdtop 6y ago
I have a love-hate relationship with Delphi/Pascal. Love the language and what I can do with it. Hate the buggy IDE. Love that fpc is n open-source pascal compiler. Hate the the Lazarus IDE was difficult to use (when I last tried it a few years ago). Sad that so many comments talk about pascal in the past tense.
johnx123-up 6y ago
FWIW, https://groups.google.com/g/borland.public.delphi.non-technical/c/dK1AaC3QTaM https://groups.google.com/g/borland.public.delphi.non-techni... List of cool applications written in Delphi (long thread, 2006)
dukeofdoom 6y ago
As a solo developer, the price of a new license is kind of crazy to keep upgrading. Otherwise would continue to develop in it. Loved delphi, hated the paradox database that came with it.
mengibar10 6y ago
1988 was the year I started using Pascal while still in college. I developed and released a general ledger software for small accounting firms in 1989 using it. Sold 20 copies, bought myself a printer. It was a great experience that I could never duplicate to this day. It became better with Delphi release, so easy to develop UI using those drag and drop widgets.
dbsmith83 6y ago
Ah, I remember being in middle school and buying a huge book seeming to be 6 inches thick with a copy of Delphi 1.0. This was what started it for me. The really cool thing was that in Delphi, you could often import Visual Basic components. Me and my friend would look for components that other VB programs would use and try to use them in our own projects. GUI creation is second to none with Delphi/Lazarus and I love the event based system, but nowadays I find writing in Pascal a little...not fun.
mdip 6y ago
Oh man, I learned to code in Pascal writing a BBS in the 90s. Back in the 90s, I had the option of taking a BASIC or Pascal course over at the High School next door to my middle school; I opted for the latter, and started studying C shortly thereafter but wrote almost everything in Turbo, later Borland Pascal and ultimately did a few Delphi projects. I think I had to save up for a year to buy a really real license for the development environment (12 years old on a $5/wk allowance with $10/lawn mow ... it took a while). Gotta say, I kind of miss it. Wonder if they ever updated the old `crt` pascal library; I believe it's purpose was to simply allow basic terminal text coloring/features, its name was always a little odd. Folks, today, might not make the connection at all. :)
raynr 6y ago
Delphi 2 was my introduction to programming. It was on a pirate CD-ROM together with many other programs - Office, C++ Builder, Visual Studio. Once I discovered it (because of course I'd play with all the programs on the pirate CD), I was amazed. At the time I didn't know of an easier way to draw windows and buttons and stuff, and have them do what you expect them to do (Visual Basic? Pfft, edgy, tweenage me scoffed at the idea of compiling pseudocode that had to be interpreted at runtime. And don't tell tweenage me about MFC, past me would never have admitted that using the MS foundation classes in C++ was too difficult for my dumb brain. I also didn't "get" C++ so couldn't get on with Borland's C++ builder. But object pascal... object pascal was structured and easy to understand and compiled to machine code in an eyeblink so was therefore superior to everything else!!! Man, what a butt I was...) First program I wrote and released was a game editor. Someone had reverse engineered a certain video game's file and data structure and documented the offsets and sizes of all the stats of the entities in the game. I used that information and slapped a shitty GUI with comboboxes and dropdown lists and number fields (with no bounds checking I think), together with some very dodgy file read/write code I part copied from some geocities page and part copied from some reference book code, and I made my first game editor. People actually used it! Man, that felt cool. Man, what a butt I was, I was the very definition of an "I am a programmer" meme. Later on that information made its way into a UGE module so my program was no longer relevant. I remember borrowing Delphi reference books from the library and, not having enough computer time, hand writing my code to learn. Good times. I didn't know Delphi was still in use, I am obviously not in the development line anymore. 26 years! I feel old!
- nunb 6y ago
  Oh the joys of tweenage discovery! For me it was writing programs in dbase+ and lotus123 ... much later I did MFC and a precursor whose name escapes me now... what a programming dead end that was!
- alexott 6y ago
  Power++ was much easier to use - it was really hiding a lot of internal things, so you worked with handlers only, etc. no need to look into class declarations, etc. https://www.drdobbs.com/powersofts-power-20/184415592 https://www.drdobbs.com/powersofts-power-20/184415592
mhd 6y ago
Yeah, Idera, tell me how great Delphi was before you friggin' ruined it, like everything you touch. Anyway, we've recently had "FoxPro" guest-star here, and Delphi definitely was one that took its lunch money. Decent small-business relational databases appeared, and people were eager to marry it with fancy GUIs -- maybe even with that new-fangled 32 bit Windows Microsoft was promising. Visual Basic was what Microsoft offered. But for many, the language felt a bit awkward, as did the programming paradigm. I'm leaning a bit out of the meaphorical window here, but there's an argument to be made that VB was closer to 4GLs than "conventional" programming languages. Delphi just really hit a sweet spot. A fast Pascal compiler was to be expected from them, the OO features were available in previous Turbo Pascal versions, too. But all very nicely integrated into a truly RAD IDE -- if what you wanted to develop rapidly was a CRUD Windows app. Still one of the best experiences doing that. I'd have done more if for a while my corporate masters didn't demand Java/Swing or sacrificing goats (MFC). And then mobile devices finally ruined every chance of ever getting a decent desktop GUI again.
- TheJimMcKeeth 6y ago
  Curious how you feel Idera ruined Delphi? Is it the introduction of a free Community Edition with all the features of Professional including mobile platform support? Or maybe the all new Linux compiler? Sounds like you haven't looked at Delphi in a while. It is better than ever in my opinion.
  - thijsvandien 6y ago
    How about some full disclosure here? Spreading that opinion is a main part of your job (Developer Advocate at Embarcadero/Idera).
  - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
    It is entirely possible for something to be "ruined", and then open sourced as a last resort when the ship has long sailed for that being a useful tactic. So while I haven't followed the ecosystem since Turbo Pascal for DOS (when I wrote a Battletech simulator over summer in college and had the entire runtime API committed to memory aside from pie graphs).. My impression of it over the years is that it was closed source for way too long as whoever owned Delphi tried to ride its legacy paying customers as they dwindled to nothingness, and then open sourced it. I have the same vague impression of smalltalk as well, but I never programmed in it.
ivanhoe 6y ago
Delphi had, by far, the best documentation that I've ever encountered. Every Win API method was documented, explained and illustrated with an example. Delphi 4 manual was so much easier to follow than Microsoft's own Win16/32 API help in VS C++ (which I actually used more back then).
dver 6y ago
Another year and another Delphi post. Started with Delphi 2, the productivity benefits vs VB were amazing. Plus managing code and having a usable object based language. I went from nothing to a PLC(programmable logic controller) to database manufacturing floor delivery system in 3 weeks for my first app. Amazing productivity. Cut to now, I have a custom MES/ERP app written in D7 I still support or for 3 sites. 20 years old. Every couple of weeks I have to boot up the VM and do a few things.
nocubicles 6y ago
I am using Pascal like language daily at work. Its modern version of Pascal powering modern ERP ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-programming-in-al https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-centra... ) I have background in Javascript, Golang, Typescript and all other modern web technologies but I have to say I enjoy working with it and its very highly productive for me.
markus_zhang 6y ago
Back in Windows 3.1 if you have a 44,373 KB free RAM then it was really a lot. Anyone still using Delphi for large-scale new projects? I'm pretty sure there are a bunch of legacy ones around the corner but what about new ones?
Lukesys 6y ago
Delphi was amazing in the Borland days, not so much after then!
pjmlp 6y ago
Nice memories, I keep trying to find Delphi soul in Java and .NET.
pdfernhout 6y ago
I liked Delphi when I used it a bunch in the mid-to late 1990s (mainly Delphi 2.0). Three years ago, I ported a Delphi application called StoryHarp from back then in my spare time to TypeScript/Mithril+Tachyons. https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js Years earlier, I had made a parsing tool I wrote years ago to help with some of that -- which I have not made publicly available because I am not sure about the copyright status of the grammar files I started from. Some random notes on the conversion process which involved a lot of hand conversions: https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js/blob/master/conversion-notes.txt https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js/blob/master/conve... Before and after the automated conversion: https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js/tree/master/converted_source/used https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js/tree/master/conve... But given the way Delphi type declarations are similar to TypeScript type declarations (designed by the same person), and you need to make some major changes to redo the UI in Mithril, doing the entire thing by hand (and with the help of some regexes to replace stuff) might not have been that much harder? Still have a couple of other applications from those years I want to covert to TypeScript someday (a garden simulator called Garden With Insight and a 3D botanical plant design tool called PlantStudio). That said, Delphi is still a great language -- even if I perhaps regret using it overall instead of just sticking with Smalltalk, which was harder then to deliver an application with. We had also been using C++ at one point before that too, and Delphi was a lot easier to work with than C++ in the 1990s -- even if I'd guess dealing with C++ code nowadays might be easier overall with improved standard libraries, memory leak tools, and faster computers? My wife who was working on the projects with me then also knew Pascal well from academic projects, so Delphi was also easier for her than C++. However, same as me, she liked Smalltalk better. If we had know then that something like Squeak would come along eventually, we might have stuck with Smalltalk over Delphi. I also have a music-related Java Android app I'd like to port to TypeScript, so it is not just Delphi. I just would like having some past major projects in a widely-supported language I'm using now for other things and which runs easily in the browser.
Narishma 6y ago
Is it me or do those Windows 3.1 screenshots look much more readable than the modern ones?
- bbkane 6y ago
  You might like SerenityOS. It's a hobbyist OS with a similar aesthetic and the authors seem to have a lot of fun making it. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
speransky 6y ago
That was amazing times when with Delphi you can build an app with database which automates some tasks and sell it to local business. Easy money. Lawyers, libraries, trade businesses, even gas station !
yarone 6y ago
Tried Delphi a million years ago. Was too in love with Visual Basic 3.0. Couldn't do it.
npalm 6y ago
We still maintain our flagship software in Delphi. We were on Delphi 6 until a year ago we jumped to modern Delphi. We were surprised to learn that the Delphi installer was quite broken and the 1 year license doesn't include install help after the first month! Needless to say, we promptly started migrating our code to something else.
- vram22 6y ago
  >1 year license They don't have a permanent license?
  - detaro 6y ago
    Like many other developer tools it's initial fee + yearly pricing to get further updates.
    - vram22 6y ago
      Got it, thanks.
sys_64738 6y ago
Whatever happened to Power Builder?
steve_taylor 6y ago
It’s a pity the language is ugly and the price is sky high. It’s otherwise a fantastic way of rapidly building native Windows apps. It would be amazing with a language something like Swift.
dang 6y ago
A similar article from a year ago: https://damieng.com/blog/2020/02/14/delphi-birthday-my-story https://damieng.com/blog/2020/02/14/delphi-birthday-my-story (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24705109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24705109, but no comments there).
anta40 6y ago
I started learning Delphi in 2003 (or 2002?) when in high school. At that time, not many of us were interested in programming, probably only the "geeks". Of course, typically high schoolers prefer sports, online games, or music. I taught myself QB, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, VB. Well, VB was my 1st exposure to Windows programming. Making Windows apps was very easy. I wrote tiny web browser (using built-in IE component), audio player, a tool to bypass Ctrl-Alt-Del (copied from Planet Source Code), simple Symbian games (with AppForge Mobile VB) etc. Then I found a book explaining database programming... with Delphi. I believe it was Delphi 6. Unlike MSVC, Delphi was surpisingly easy to learn. Sure, I already had some Pascal knowledge. After that, I ported most of my existing VB codes into Delphi. 1 year before graduation, I found another book about mobile app programming. At that time, smartphones weren't that popular unlike today. Only really rich kids who used Sony P900 or Nokia 9210i. J2ME-enabled mobiles phones were relatively more popular, at least. And that's how I joined the Java world, which until today is still is. I kinda miss Delphi. Yes, I'm aware there's an open source alternative: Lazarus. Let's see if I still can write something interesting with it :)

197 points by mustafabisic1 6y ago

In any discussion about Delphi, you really should also mention Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/). It's more mature (i.e. more cross platform) than Delphi, and fully open source. It's based on the Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) (https://www.freepascal.org/ https://www.freepascal.org/) (also open source).

FpUser 6y ago
It is more cross platform but integrated debugger kind of sucks. I am doing some project for Raspberry Pi 4 and had to resort to debugPrint() as on some breakpoints it reports gdb error and terminates debugging.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  Indeed, i always have issues with gdb and Lazarus (under Windows) with the debugger randomly deciding to stop working or not stepping through code (even with zero optimizations) or other stuff. However the new debugger written specifically for Free Pascal seems to work much better - just not available everywhere ATM.
justin66 6y ago
Has anyone published a good comparison of the two compilers building the same project? It’d be interesting to know how compile times compare.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  The original Delphi compiler which was in use until some versions ago (and might still be available, dunno) was much faster than Free Pascal while producing more or less the same quality code (in terms of performance) but could only target Windows. Free Pascal targets a bunch of other CPUs and OSes though. I haven't tried any of the recent versions, but AFAIK they're based on LLVM so i'd expect compilation times to have went up but produced executables to be a bit faster. FWIW Free Pascal's developers have mentioned at the past that fast compiler performance isn't really something that they care much about (though in practice FPC is among the faster compilers, just not as fast as Delphi used to be).
  - justin66 6y ago
    > FWIW Free Pascal's developers have mentioned at the past that fast compiler performance isn't really something that they care much about That's an interesting evolution. It had a lot of nice features, but compile time was the only thing about Delphi that was really magical.
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      Well, Free Pascal was never as fast as Delphi and i doubt its feature set would allow it to be as fast anyway. Delphi only supported a single platform for a single CPU for the largest majority of its lifetime whereas Free Pascal supported a ton of different CPUs and platforms while also adding support for a variety of different Pascal dialects at the same time and often extending the language beyond what you'd see in Delphi - all that adds up quickly. Still, as i wrote, in practice FPC is quite fast. Lazarus itself is almost two million lines of code and yet it compiles and links in seconds.
gramie 6y ago
"It's more mature" Usually that implies that bugs and rough patches have been ironed out. I would have to say that Delphi is far more polished than Lazarus. Not that I'm complaining about Lazarus, it's an amazing accomplishment and I play around with it every now and then to see how far it's come.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  Well... in a perfect universe where bad decisions are never made, sure. But a few years after the turn of the century someone at Borland/Inprise/CodeGear/whatever decided to rewrite the IDE while chasing .NET when under a company that by that time had completely lost any interest in development tools. I've only tried the trial/free Delphi versions sporadically and TBH 'polished' isn't something i'd use to describe them. Then again neither is something i'd use to describe Lazarus (which i'm using much more often), however that is for completely different reasons.

dsparkman 6y ago

Delphi, ah the memories. I use to make a fair amount of money in the late 90s making shareware applications with Delphi. It was the most productive I have ever been as a developer. But, the world moved to web fairly rapidly, so I had to move on to the web.

statictype 6y ago
What were your apps?
- dsparkman 6y ago
  I had Spinel Clean and Tidy that let you clean-up your registry and various temp files that were left all over the place back in the Win95 era. Also Spinel ScreenPik which was a screen capture utility.

xony 6y ago

embarcadero , wondering why they couldn't retain the original name borland? .. it was a nice platform , cant afford subscription model so moved on to open source technologies.

BruceEel 6y ago

Delphi! Purchased ver.3.0 back in the day, it was excellent. So, who's using Delphi in prod anno 2021?

dejv 6y ago
I am not writing Delphi code anymore (but did that for close to 20 years professionally), but there are many artifacts still up and running and would probably run for next few decades if not longer. 1) I've started my programming career by creating new user interface for device that measures properties of metal joins on [BIG] machines [1]. It is used by many mining and energy companies. First version of this device was created somewhere in 70s so I guess this new one will last for many decades to come. 2) There was a time when every company created its own ERP software and I was hired to help maintain 500k lines of code monster that is used by fair chunk of construction companies in Austria. All the accounting, warehouse, quoting, payroll and what not was based on top of old Paradox database. Custom hacks were deployed to make sure we fit everything into 64kb of index space and I've got massive headaches trying to make work decades old database in networking mode. Another fun year was at the time when Vista changed memory layout and you sometimes crash everything because of memory location that was meant to be for printers is now occupied by sound stuff and you've touched protected memory. Anyway as far as I know this system is up and running, counting numbers, printing invoices, work orders and quotes all days long. [1] https://www.popsci.com/resizer/meUXbu78Po3bGHtIFIaRTwBsLqg=/2068x1552/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-bonnier.s3.amazonaws.com/public/MTUGSVPHBB22CKTZETTB42BCIE.jpg https://www.popsci.com/resizer/meUXbu78Po3bGHtIFIaRTwBsLqg=/...
- BruceEel 6y ago
  1) Big machine awesomeness!! Respect++ to you. 2) Funny, I did a fair bit of freelancing at construction companies back in the early 90's, mostly using Paradox (3.x DOS, if I'm not wrong) and mostly helping out with the insane reporting required for taking part in public tenders. I still have nightmares and have not gone back to freelancing since then.
  - dejv 6y ago

martin_a 6y ago

I think I've posted it before, but I'll repeat myself nevertheless: Delphi was my first contact with programming. I was probably 13 or 14 years old and had no idea what I was doing, but I could resize the windows, add items to lists, change the color of Strings and place buttons and stuff like this. So, _obviously_ I needed the Delphi 6 Enterprise edition which a friend had (pirated of course) and gave it to me on one of those really cheap CD-R with that distinctive plastic smell. One of the first "real programs" we wrote was something to read sensor data via the parallel port. It was for a school project where a belt had to move and then stop, once the light barrier would sense something. We killed lots of parallel ports in doing that, because we just didn't knew how to do it. Didn't really write anything more useful at that time, but it showed me that there's a world behind what we see and know as "programs". Maybe it laid some fundations in my brain, who knows. Every time I see Delphi pop up I think I should probably have a look at it. But I'm a web monkey now. Lost for everything good, but I like to think back of the 14 year old me. Better times.

nezirus 6y ago
My experience was very similar to yours, playing around with components and forms on Delphi 3; But in addition to that I've managed to learn some assembly with Delphi (asm blocks), go figure. And the speed of the compiler on my venerable Pentium MMX 166MHz!!! (Sad looks towards my Rust build on a 100x more powerful computer :-( )
binwiederhier 6y ago
This could have been written by me. I loved Delphi and learned how to write software using Delphi 5. We got a cheap copy from school so I didn't have to pirate it. I still have that printout of the class hierarchy of the standard library and the CD ROM. I loved Delphi and I'll be forever grateful for the lessons I've learned.
loa_in_ 6y ago
My beginnings were Turbo Pascal and Delphi. I guess I got spoiled because I never found an IDE where GUI design was do intuitive and easy afterwards

statictype 6y ago

Delphi was great. I remember downloading it (pirated obviously) over a 14k connection. It took like a day. The killer feature was that it could build stand lone executables with no runtime. On one hand I really miss those days. On the other hand, what we have today is far superior. Its a great time to be alive for a kid who wants to learn how to program.

kwanbix 6y ago
For desktop? I am not sure what we have is superior. Unless you count, which was designed by the same guy who did Delphi.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  We might not have better commercial tools for building pixel-perfect UIs for apps that are going to run on a narrow range of devices in terms of capabilities and display sizes. We've got better F/OSS tools for, well, everything else, desktop or otherwise, than the commercial tools of that time, though.
fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
From my perspective, the modern web is mostly a regression: subscriptions or advertising everywhere, frustrating tools for building UIs, etc.
- statictype 6y ago
  You don't have to download a pirated IDE for starters. There is a wealth of good open source tools and content.
nirav72 6y ago
yep. This is exactly what attracted me to Delphi. Did a lot of Pascal dev in college with TP. Then tried out VB 3.0 for windows dev. Hated VB because of the performance and having to include the VB runtime. Delphi created a single standalone executable and it was fast. Back in those days, if you wanted close to C/C++ performance without having to learn or deal with the complexities, Delphi was the next best thing.

kolinko 6y ago

Ah delphi, earned some of my first money as a student doing two awesome projects in Delphi that worked for the next 10 years... I still haven’t found anything with such a good interface builder (Xcode comes close, but it’s still worse imho)

whoisthemachine 6y ago
The C# WinForms UI builder is a nice ripoff of the Delphi UI builder.
- msh 6y ago
  Its not really a ripoff as C# and Delphi is designed by the same person.
- nirav72 6y ago
  ahh not really. VB and powerbuilder UI builders predate Delphi and Csharp.
  - vram22 6y ago
    Yes, that is why when Delphi 1 (or 2?) was announced, it was billed as the VB killer. That never happened, I guess, though it did become somewhat successful. I used both VB and Delphi some, in work and personal projects. Preferred Delphi by far.
    - nirav72 6y ago
      Oh I definately agree, Delphi was a better dev tool compared to VB at the time. No runtime needed to be shipped, standalone fully compiled executable alone was the killer feature.

simion314 6y ago

I did not used Delphi but did a a few Windows apps with C# and Windows Forms int he past, I am curious in the present day for Windows only dev what would be the advantage of using Delphi over C# with VS or Intellij.

marcocantu 6y ago
Delphi produces native applications with no dependency, offers components encapsulating Windows APIs, COM, WinRT -- and a great native platform experience. Binary code with no dependency = real xcopy deployment, small deployment, memory and CPU efficiency. It's like writing in VC++ in terms of power, but visual and high level in terms of dev experience
- simion314 6y ago
  Thanks for response, I agree with parts of your response but I do not understand what you mean with "components encapsulating Windows APIs, COM, WinRT" in comparison with .Net , I mean .Net also wraps the majority of the win32 and other APIs.
  - candiodari 6y ago
    Yes but the resulting .exe depends on like 20 installed .dlls. For starters, the .NET runtime, which will fundamentally limit where your app runs. Second updates in those underlying dlls and runtimes may prevent your app from working correctly. So if the customer doesn't have or screws up their .NET installation, your app stops running. Getting a Delphi app to stop running on windows through bad sysadminning ... I haven't seen it done. Think of C# apps like java .jar applications. They end in .exe, but they're not, not really. And at least .jar makes it a lot clearer it needs a JRE to run, and it's cross platform to boot.
    - simion314 6y ago
      Your reply is not what I asked. I know the issues with the .Net dependency, like user has 4.0 but the app depends on 4.5 or similar problems. But this is not a big issue and you can if you want bundle the Java or .Net runtime inside the application. Anyway I was aware of this binary size / memory usage difference in favor of unmanaged code, my question was something else, if you can clarify that or admit it was an error would be great.

soenkeliebau 6y ago

This article made me feel really, really old!

bluedino 6y ago

I loved Pascal and I did most of my DOS programming with it until DJGPP. But for Windows in jumped right to Visual C++. All because Delphi was “dying”, at least in popularity. So I never got to give it a chance.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

One of my competitors used Delphi to write their software. One part of the software ran under the print spooler so when 64-bit Windows came along they were stuffed as the 64-bit version of Delphi was slow to arrive. I did quite well out of that.

Gehinnn 6y ago

I remember when I turned 16 and all I wanted as birthday present was a license for Delphi 2009. If I remember correctly, it costed more than €1k at that time. Obviously I got something else. When I learned about the free Visual Studio Express, I switched to .Net development and never used Delphi again. This experience shaped me and all tools I will ever create will be available for free to students and kids.

rahoulb 6y ago
Thats because Microsoft hired Anders Hjeilsberg, architect of Delphi, to create the .net platform and the C# language. And in the process signing the death warrant for Borland (who created Delphi). The rumour was Microsoft's own staff preferred using Delphi to their own tools, which is why they hired Hjeilsberg.
- Gehinnn 6y ago
  The killing feature was not .Net for me, but the free and fully featured IDE. I hated to type out every public declaration twice in the Delphi 5 IDE I got from school. I remember that I hated the startup time of Visual Studio though. In Delphi 5, I typed invalid syntax to create a temporary bookmark: When I pressed F5 to compile the project, I immediately jumped to it. This was entirely impossible for C# programs.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  First of all, Anders was hired to create J++. Secondly, he only joined after been asked multiple times by ex-Borland colleges when he felt it wasn't his place any longer at Borland. https://youtu.be/0g-IjyFnrAM https://youtu.be/0g-IjyFnrAM
- andi999 6y ago
  Borland killed itself by switching to services.

jamesdhutton 6y ago

When it first came out, Delphi was streets ahead of the main Microsoft options available at the time, namely VB and Visual C++. I remember it with great affection.

Pelic4n 6y ago

Delphi is as old as Python, damn.

davidhbolton 6y ago
Even older. It's the Windows follow on to Dos Turbo Pascal which existed from 1984.

jhbadger 6y ago

A lot of this was good, reminding us that the world of 1995 when Delphi was first released was quite different from now. But the idea that "The video games industry was in its early days" in 1995 is a bit of a weird assertion. So the 8-bit and 16-bit eras didn't count?

markus_zhang 6y ago
Yeah that line also hit me as a bit weird. Even when we count the PC game industry it was pretty mature at that time already.

kristaps 6y ago

> When Delphi was released in 1005 Lovely typo, although it undeniably feels as if Delphi has been around forever.

marcocantu 6y ago
Ops, fixed, yes somehow funny
vram22 6y ago
I guess that should be 1995. Same year as Java 1, FWIW.
- vram22 6y ago
  Used that from year 1, too, for some years.

captainmuon 6y ago

Unfortunately, I've never used Delphi. But the article makes me nostalgic for the old school Borland style GUIs with icons on the buttons and stippled backgrounds. Or the CTL3D style which was really modern at the end of the Win 3.1 era.

jacquesm 6y ago
Compared to developing an application for the web those Borland interfaces were wicked fast and pretty clever. Extremely productive.

kwanbix 6y ago

Sadly it was killed by so many bad decisions from Borland. It was really a great tool. Maybe if Microsoft had bought it instead of "just hiring" Anders Hejlsberg?

barrkel 6y ago
Anti-trust. In fact Microsoft invested in Borland as part of a settlement for predatory hiring, IIRC.

nottorp 6y ago

26 years ago Delphi was pretty affordable and you didn't need a lawyer to protect yourself from the licensor too :)

elvis70 6y ago

I remember using Delphi 1 on a 386 under Windows 3.1 and watching and even listening to the GUI reloading from the swap file component by component. I had enough RAM but I think the Windows memory manager was not great. Today, I'd throw the PC out the window, but at the time, there was something reassuring about it. But maybe I'm embellishing my memories.

r0b05 6y ago

Out here in the battlegrounds of web development, this article makes me miss the safe cocoon of Delphi and Windows development.

u678u 6y ago

BTW from memory Delphi was named as such as it was the main route to Oracle which was the most common enterprise database. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi

jacquesm 6y ago

I still occasionally come across Delphi in use today, and even new projects are started using it as the core technology. It definitely wouldn't be my choice but it is interesting to see how productive people can be with this even now.

flaie 6y ago

I remember when I discovered Delphi, it was in circa 2001-2002. At the time I was 16-17 and knew how to program with PHP (I was modding phpBB at the time), tried with PHP-GTK to build user interfaces, but found it not that great. Then I discovered Delphi, already knew some parts of Pascal. But what a gem it was, in a matter of days I felt like I was totally proficient, could create windows, manage resize, add components, tweak colors, run background tasks, want a listview? just drag it. Need a HTTP call? drag the component (can't remember the name), connect onclick to it, and you're done. I recall the website torry.net with plenty of libraries to download. I also tried Borland C++, but wasn't good enough with it, and as I remember discovering that even DevC++ was written with Delphi. Simply figuring out it was good enough for me. I created so much things with it until like 2004-2005 I think, like a complete terminal on my Windows, re implementing standard commands all within Delphi. Wrote some games companion for Rainbow Six and RavenShield [1], fetching statistics and available servers, scanning games to find your friends, downloaded thousand times. An alt-tab which worked with Quake III that at the time was also downloaded hundreds of times, a companion to The All Seeing Eye (server browsing), a small Photoshop tool where I learnt how to create my own filters like Gaussian blurs and so on [2], key mapping profiles for plenty of games by modifying INI files [3], a code formatter inside DevC++ [4], ... I have lost all of my source code (didn't knew how to backup things at the time), still have some binaries and screenshots for posterity I remember this period with nostalgia and great passion. Thank you Delphi for the good times and all the fun, this is when I really knew what I wanted to do after school. [1] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160435-948cd786-2d0c-4641-b56c-00104e53a167.37.res.jpg https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160435-948cd7... [2] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160351-cc03e033-b5c0-4c7c-85bb-2d0f7a8b300f.37.res.jpg https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160351-cc03e0... [3] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160401-712b1fa8-88a7-4e3b-9ae3-b6873cf55694.37.res.jpg https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160401-712b1f... [4] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160338-6f856cae-afa9-4e13-8084-c00ab633942b.37.res.jpg https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160338-6f856c... && https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160330-cc512a98-cb8b-4532-a089-6761344cf58f.37.res.jpg https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160330-cc512a...

midrus 6y ago

Great memories. Delphi was my first programming language. I learned it from programming magazines I used to buy when I was about 17 years old or so. My dad had a small supermarket at that time, and I remember the first useful program I built in my life was a small application to scan discount coupons he used to accept. Those coupons had a barcode and I discovered the hand scanners we used were just doing keyboard emulation. So I wrote an application in Delphi that would allow my father to scan all coupons at the end of the day and then print a sheet with a table of quantities, amounts, subtotals and totals of the money he had in coupons... something he was doing by hand before this. He was so happy with this program. The program itself was very, very, very shitty, but it worked well for him. For example, at that point I didn't even knew that arrays existed, so all the logic and multiplication was done manually, like label43 = textInput25 * textInput24 * 0.1. I also remember that, in order to send the form to the printer, I wrote code to go control by control, change the background to white, the border to black, calling something like form.printForm() and then restoring all the colors. This caused a horrible flickering when printing... but hey... it worked!! The best memories I have was that probably, this was the first time I had that "feeling" of having built something useful to somebody. And certainly the best moment was when one of his suppliers who also accepted those coupons asked us for a copy of the program. Great times. Some days I feel like I've never have built something as useful again since then .

bm98 6y ago
>The best memories I have was that probably, this was the first time I had that "feeling" of having built something useful to somebody. And certainly the best moment was when one of his suppliers who also accepted those coupons asked us for a copy of the program. Great times. And then you go off to college, and one day the program stops working because of one problem or another, and they call you in the middle of studying for final exams, and that's when you learned about technical support and technical debt and all the things that make programming less fun! Some people have recurring dreams in which they show up to school or work in their pajamas... my recurring dream is that some program I wrote in high school is still being used twenty years later, and they come calling because something broke...
- 6y ago

flrizzato 6y ago

Doing backend apps with Delphi is very fun and productive!

imagine99 6y ago
Care to share some examples of what you're doing? I'm always curious...

mikewarot 6y ago

I started in Turbo Pascal, and migrated to Delphi when it came along, it was cheap enough that I had the pro version up until I moved into SysAdmin. Now that I want to dive back into production programming, Delphi has basically priced itself out of existence for me. Lazarus is a good alternative, a bit buggy, but at least I can afford it. Eventually I'll probably implement a Pascal layer on top of Racket. As far as straight up GUI toolkits go, there's no better tool than Delphi. I doubt I'll ever have something that powerful again.

mobilio 6y ago
Mine first TP was version 5.0 or 5.5. I still love how fast was IDE then. When TP (or BP) was released i was still love old versions because they can compile to RAM, while new one only can compile to disk.
e12e 6y ago
> Eventually I'll probably implement a Pascal layer on top of Racket. https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal
tomjen3 6y ago
May I suggest windows presentation framework? It is very different in thought to Delphi but it would be my candidate for most powerful GUI toolkit, even more than Delphi. With the obvious proviso that for most the time of the Desktop computer has passed, so the most powerful GUI framework might be Vue or React at this point.
- imagine99 6y ago
  > for most the time of the Desktop computer has passed Might I respectfully disagree? Whenever I walk into a business, especially a larger one with open floor offices (and I admit, it has been a while, for obvious reasons), I see exactly one thing: Rows of desktop PCs (incl. laptop). Not tablets. Not smartphones. Desktop PCs (whether they run VDI or aren't much bigger than a CD case is immaterial). I'd strongly argue that most productive work on an electronic device is still performed at desktops (or laptops, which in this case are the same thing). I get that when it comes to consumers, mobile is king and all that. That might be true. But for businesses, the choice of developing an internal tool web-based rather than cranking it out in Delphi and copying the exe on a network share, is simply down to the availability of developers. Not many decision-makers today still know about Delphi as a viable alternative (even for web and mobile development btw!) and when you can get much more developers at reasonable rates for React projects and don't have to fork over thousands to an unsympathetic company called Idera, well, it's almost a no-brainer. But I'd still argue that you can get more done in an afternoon with Delphi than with Vue if you start with a blank slate - and at a fraction of keystrokes, too! ;-) ~> change my mind :-)

deleted 6y ago

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ruph123 6y ago

Whenever I heard “Delphi”, I thought it was an ancient programming language that older colleagues used to mention (“... <anecdote> ... many moons ago, back when I used to program Delphi.”). But so Delphi really is/was a GUI editor? Something like an ancient Qt Creator? And according to Wikipedia it is not even a language but is using “Object Pascal”. Wild. I wonder why this never comes up when I read a out cross platform GUI frameworks...

jonp888 6y ago
The lack of any free or hobbyist-priced editions when everybody else was giving away their tooling for free more or less killed it off. It is still beloved by it's acolytes and there are a handful people out there who learned Delphi 20 years ago and stubbornly refuse to use anything else. It's an uphill struggle though because no-one releases a Delphi SDK for anything anymore.
- markus_zhang 6y ago
  Just curious why don't they do that now? Like a community edition. I guess that's because there are still some licensed editions out there and they are OK with the $$ they bring in. But what about the future?
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    They do do that: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-download/ https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-dow... It's just way, way late to the party, so most guests left :(
    - markus_zhang 6y ago
      Oh that's so sad. Personally I never used Pascal/Delphi because I was barred from using a computer (because my father thought I'd just play games instead of learning anything useful) until late into the 90s and I was not in a CS major, but my father used it extensively as he worked as Math-turned-CS professor in a University and Pascal was pretty popular at the time. I also read the book about Borland vs Microsoft and kind of feeling sorry that Pascal/Delphi didn't make it. Just a question, say I wanna develop a 2d map editor for Windows 10, does Delphi win over C# in the sense of RAD?

kdtop 6y ago

I have a love-hate relationship with Delphi/Pascal. Love the language and what I can do with it. Hate the buggy IDE. Love that fpc is n open-source pascal compiler. Hate the the Lazarus IDE was difficult to use (when I last tried it a few years ago). Sad that so many comments talk about pascal in the past tense.

johnx123-up 6y ago

FWIW, https://groups.google.com/g/borland.public.delphi.non-technical/c/dK1AaC3QTaM https://groups.google.com/g/borland.public.delphi.non-techni... List of cool applications written in Delphi (long thread, 2006)

dukeofdoom 6y ago

As a solo developer, the price of a new license is kind of crazy to keep upgrading. Otherwise would continue to develop in it. Loved delphi, hated the paradox database that came with it.

mengibar10 6y ago

1988 was the year I started using Pascal while still in college. I developed and released a general ledger software for small accounting firms in 1989 using it. Sold 20 copies, bought myself a printer. It was a great experience that I could never duplicate to this day. It became better with Delphi release, so easy to develop UI using those drag and drop widgets.

dbsmith83 6y ago

Ah, I remember being in middle school and buying a huge book seeming to be 6 inches thick with a copy of Delphi 1.0. This was what started it for me. The really cool thing was that in Delphi, you could often import Visual Basic components. Me and my friend would look for components that other VB programs would use and try to use them in our own projects. GUI creation is second to none with Delphi/Lazarus and I love the event based system, but nowadays I find writing in Pascal a little...not fun.

mdip 6y ago

Oh man, I learned to code in Pascal writing a BBS in the 90s. Back in the 90s, I had the option of taking a BASIC or Pascal course over at the High School next door to my middle school; I opted for the latter, and started studying C shortly thereafter but wrote almost everything in Turbo, later Borland Pascal and ultimately did a few Delphi projects. I think I had to save up for a year to buy a really real license for the development environment (12 years old on a $5/wk allowance with $10/lawn mow ... it took a while). Gotta say, I kind of miss it. Wonder if they ever updated the old `crt` pascal library; I believe it's purpose was to simply allow basic terminal text coloring/features, its name was always a little odd. Folks, today, might not make the connection at all. :)

raynr 6y ago

Delphi 2 was my introduction to programming. It was on a pirate CD-ROM together with many other programs - Office, C++ Builder, Visual Studio. Once I discovered it (because of course I'd play with all the programs on the pirate CD), I was amazed. At the time I didn't know of an easier way to draw windows and buttons and stuff, and have them do what you expect them to do (Visual Basic? Pfft, edgy, tweenage me scoffed at the idea of compiling pseudocode that had to be interpreted at runtime. And don't tell tweenage me about MFC, past me would never have admitted that using the MS foundation classes in C++ was too difficult for my dumb brain. I also didn't "get" C++ so couldn't get on with Borland's C++ builder. But object pascal... object pascal was structured and easy to understand and compiled to machine code in an eyeblink so was therefore superior to everything else!!! Man, what a butt I was...) First program I wrote and released was a game editor. Someone had reverse engineered a certain video game's file and data structure and documented the offsets and sizes of all the stats of the entities in the game. I used that information and slapped a shitty GUI with comboboxes and dropdown lists and number fields (with no bounds checking I think), together with some very dodgy file read/write code I part copied from some geocities page and part copied from some reference book code, and I made my first game editor. People actually used it! Man, that felt cool. Man, what a butt I was, I was the very definition of an "I am a programmer" meme. Later on that information made its way into a UGE module so my program was no longer relevant. I remember borrowing Delphi reference books from the library and, not having enough computer time, hand writing my code to learn. Good times. I didn't know Delphi was still in use, I am obviously not in the development line anymore. 26 years! I feel old!

nunb 6y ago
Oh the joys of tweenage discovery! For me it was writing programs in dbase+ and lotus123 ... much later I did MFC and a precursor whose name escapes me now... what a programming dead end that was!
alexott 6y ago
Power++ was much easier to use - it was really hiding a lot of internal things, so you worked with handlers only, etc. no need to look into class declarations, etc. https://www.drdobbs.com/powersofts-power-20/184415592 https://www.drdobbs.com/powersofts-power-20/184415592

mhd 6y ago

Yeah, Idera, tell me how great Delphi was before you friggin' ruined it, like everything you touch. Anyway, we've recently had "FoxPro" guest-star here, and Delphi definitely was one that took its lunch money. Decent small-business relational databases appeared, and people were eager to marry it with fancy GUIs -- maybe even with that new-fangled 32 bit Windows Microsoft was promising. Visual Basic was what Microsoft offered. But for many, the language felt a bit awkward, as did the programming paradigm. I'm leaning a bit out of the meaphorical window here, but there's an argument to be made that VB was closer to 4GLs than "conventional" programming languages. Delphi just really hit a sweet spot. A fast Pascal compiler was to be expected from them, the OO features were available in previous Turbo Pascal versions, too. But all very nicely integrated into a truly RAD IDE -- if what you wanted to develop rapidly was a CRUD Windows app. Still one of the best experiences doing that. I'd have done more if for a while my corporate masters didn't demand Java/Swing or sacrificing goats (MFC). And then mobile devices finally ruined every chance of ever getting a decent desktop GUI again.

TheJimMcKeeth 6y ago
Curious how you feel Idera ruined Delphi? Is it the introduction of a free Community Edition with all the features of Professional including mobile platform support? Or maybe the all new Linux compiler? Sounds like you haven't looked at Delphi in a while. It is better than ever in my opinion.
- thijsvandien 6y ago
  How about some full disclosure here? Spreading that opinion is a main part of your job (Developer Advocate at Embarcadero/Idera).
- AtlasBarfed 6y ago
  It is entirely possible for something to be "ruined", and then open sourced as a last resort when the ship has long sailed for that being a useful tactic. So while I haven't followed the ecosystem since Turbo Pascal for DOS (when I wrote a Battletech simulator over summer in college and had the entire runtime API committed to memory aside from pie graphs).. My impression of it over the years is that it was closed source for way too long as whoever owned Delphi tried to ride its legacy paying customers as they dwindled to nothingness, and then open sourced it. I have the same vague impression of smalltalk as well, but I never programmed in it.

ivanhoe 6y ago

Delphi had, by far, the best documentation that I've ever encountered. Every Win API method was documented, explained and illustrated with an example. Delphi 4 manual was so much easier to follow than Microsoft's own Win16/32 API help in VS C++ (which I actually used more back then).

dver 6y ago

Another year and another Delphi post. Started with Delphi 2, the productivity benefits vs VB were amazing. Plus managing code and having a usable object based language. I went from nothing to a PLC(programmable logic controller) to database manufacturing floor delivery system in 3 weeks for my first app. Amazing productivity. Cut to now, I have a custom MES/ERP app written in D7 I still support or for 3 sites. 20 years old. Every couple of weeks I have to boot up the VM and do a few things.

nocubicles 6y ago

I am using Pascal like language daily at work. Its modern version of Pascal powering modern ERP ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-programming-in-al https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-centra... ) I have background in Javascript, Golang, Typescript and all other modern web technologies but I have to say I enjoy working with it and its very highly productive for me.

markus_zhang 6y ago

Back in Windows 3.1 if you have a 44,373 KB free RAM then it was really a lot. Anyone still using Delphi for large-scale new projects? I'm pretty sure there are a bunch of legacy ones around the corner but what about new ones?

Lukesys 6y ago

Delphi was amazing in the Borland days, not so much after then!

pjmlp 6y ago

Nice memories, I keep trying to find Delphi soul in Java and .NET.

pdfernhout 6y ago

I liked Delphi when I used it a bunch in the mid-to late 1990s (mainly Delphi 2.0). Three years ago, I ported a Delphi application called StoryHarp from back then in my spare time to TypeScript/Mithril+Tachyons. https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js Years earlier, I had made a parsing tool I wrote years ago to help with some of that -- which I have not made publicly available because I am not sure about the copyright status of the grammar files I started from. Some random notes on the conversion process which involved a lot of hand conversions: https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js/blob/master/conversion-notes.txt https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js/blob/master/conve... Before and after the automated conversion: https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js/tree/master/converted_source/used https://github.com/pdfernhout/storyharp-js/tree/master/conve... But given the way Delphi type declarations are similar to TypeScript type declarations (designed by the same person), and you need to make some major changes to redo the UI in Mithril, doing the entire thing by hand (and with the help of some regexes to replace stuff) might not have been that much harder? Still have a couple of other applications from those years I want to covert to TypeScript someday (a garden simulator called Garden With Insight and a 3D botanical plant design tool called PlantStudio). That said, Delphi is still a great language -- even if I perhaps regret using it overall instead of just sticking with Smalltalk, which was harder then to deliver an application with. We had also been using C++ at one point before that too, and Delphi was a lot easier to work with than C++ in the 1990s -- even if I'd guess dealing with C++ code nowadays might be easier overall with improved standard libraries, memory leak tools, and faster computers? My wife who was working on the projects with me then also knew Pascal well from academic projects, so Delphi was also easier for her than C++. However, same as me, she liked Smalltalk better. If we had know then that something like Squeak would come along eventually, we might have stuck with Smalltalk over Delphi. I also have a music-related Java Android app I'd like to port to TypeScript, so it is not just Delphi. I just would like having some past major projects in a widely-supported language I'm using now for other things and which runs easily in the browser.

Narishma 6y ago

Is it me or do those Windows 3.1 screenshots look much more readable than the modern ones?

bbkane 6y ago
You might like SerenityOS. It's a hobbyist OS with a similar aesthetic and the authors seem to have a lot of fun making it. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

speransky 6y ago

That was amazing times when with Delphi you can build an app with database which automates some tasks and sell it to local business. Easy money. Lawyers, libraries, trade businesses, even gas station !

yarone 6y ago

Tried Delphi a million years ago. Was too in love with Visual Basic 3.0. Couldn't do it.

npalm 6y ago

We still maintain our flagship software in Delphi. We were on Delphi 6 until a year ago we jumped to modern Delphi. We were surprised to learn that the Delphi installer was quite broken and the 1 year license doesn't include install help after the first month! Needless to say, we promptly started migrating our code to something else.

vram22 6y ago
>1 year license They don't have a permanent license?
- detaro 6y ago
  Like many other developer tools it's initial fee + yearly pricing to get further updates.
  - vram22 6y ago
    Got it, thanks.

sys_64738 6y ago

Whatever happened to Power Builder?

steve_taylor 6y ago

It’s a pity the language is ugly and the price is sky high. It’s otherwise a fantastic way of rapidly building native Windows apps. It would be amazing with a language something like Swift.

dang 6y ago

A similar article from a year ago: https://damieng.com/blog/2020/02/14/delphi-birthday-my-story https://damieng.com/blog/2020/02/14/delphi-birthday-my-story (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24705109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24705109, but no comments there).

anta40 6y ago

I started learning Delphi in 2003 (or 2002?) when in high school. At that time, not many of us were interested in programming, probably only the "geeks". Of course, typically high schoolers prefer sports, online games, or music. I taught myself QB, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, VB. Well, VB was my 1st exposure to Windows programming. Making Windows apps was very easy. I wrote tiny web browser (using built-in IE component), audio player, a tool to bypass Ctrl-Alt-Del (copied from Planet Source Code), simple Symbian games (with AppForge Mobile VB) etc. Then I found a book explaining database programming... with Delphi. I believe it was Delphi 6. Unlike MSVC, Delphi was surpisingly easy to learn. Sure, I already had some Pascal knowledge. After that, I ported most of my existing VB codes into Delphi. 1 year before graduation, I found another book about mobile app programming. At that time, smartphones weren't that popular unlike today. Only really rich kids who used Sony P900 or Nokia 9210i. J2ME-enabled mobiles phones were relatively more popular, at least. And that's how I joined the Java world, which until today is still is. I kinda miss Delphi. Yes, I'm aware there's an open source alternative: Lazarus. Let's see if I still can write something interesting with it :)