> What type of application is that, in your opinion? Not the OP, but I wanted to chime in that I think Delphi's forte is, was and will always be desktop-based

> What type of application is that, in your opinion? Not the OP, but I wanted to chime in that I think Delphi's forte is, was and will always be desktop-based GUI apps. That was always the main point. Admittedly, I haven't touched it since the early 2000s, but I can't imagine that it could compete as a language/platform for anything else these days. Its power comes from the tight GUI design/language integration, the brilliance of which is still unmatched by tools like Interface Builer; but the language — even with features like generics — hasn't been able to keep up. That said, in the late 1990s/early 2000s, I was actually using Delphi for headless backend apps. They were distributed, fairly complex backends connected using DCOM and interfacing with Windows technologies like TAPI and MAPI. We had to integrate with C libraries (linked as DLLs) and had to convert the header files to ObjectPascal. I actually wrote a tool called htrans that had a hand-coded C/C++ parser that produced very good ObjectPascal translations, but it was still a chore. Talk about going against the grain. In hindsight, I should probably have been using C++, and a lot of the problems our team had was due to the fact that we were trying to use Delphi for something that Borland just wasn't focusing on. But we did love the fast develop/compile/run cycle that Delphi provided, Delphi's OO was great at the time, and the apps worked. The difference between Delphi and C++ back then felt a lot like Rails versus, say, J2EE. It was incredibly easy to develop stuff.