Delphi was something that doesn't really exist anymore, the blending of IDE, programming language and toolkit into a single product. You programmed in Object Pa

Delphi was something that doesn't really exist anymore, the blending of IDE, programming language and toolkit into a single product. You programmed in Object Pascal, using the VCL toolkit (component suite), and because that was the only thing the IDE needed to support, it was tightly wrapped around those two things. The visual designer was the glue between the pieces. The result of compiling a delphi project was a native windows executable that used the core win32 API's underneath (the VCL was implemented over bare windows api's). Compiling was blazing fast (seconds), and the executables that came out of it were blazing fast as well (C++ level performance). This contrasted heavily with visual basic, whose apps required a slow interpreter library, which made them cumbersome to install and run.