Delphi is still very much a thing, and still very much in active development. The current stewards of Delphi, Embarcadero, released the Delphi 13 Community Edition today.
Delphi Community Edition is a full-featured, free edition of Delphi for building native applications with the Delphi language. It includes a professional IDE, visual designers, integrated compilers and debuggers, the VCL framework for Windows development, and the FireMonkey framework for creating native applications from a shared codebase across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.
It is designed for students, hobbyists, freelancers, and small teams that meet the Community Edition license requirements.
↫ Marco Cantu at the Embarcadero blog
Delphi has been around since 1995, first released for Windows 3.1. It’s both a programming language, a variant of Object Pascal, and the accompanying IDE and related tooling and frameworks, originally developed by legendary company Borland. This latest version of course adds a number of new features to the programming language, and further improves the IDE as well, this time with a brand new 64bit version. The two frameworks for visual application development, VCL and FireMonkey, have also been updated and improved.
Sadly, it’s not open source, and the Community Edition is intended for mostly non-commercial, hobbyist use. If you want to actually earn any money using Delphi, you’re going to have to step up to Delphi 13 Florence, which isn’t free.
Huh, didn’t realise this was still under active development. I remember taking a programming course back in university that used VisualBasic 6 (on Windows 3.x). I’d attend the class, do the assignments in the lab, then go home and redo them in Delphi (on Windows 95 OSR2.1). 🙂
Delphi was so much nicer to develop in compared to VB.
Haven’t done any GUI programming since then, though. It’s all bash scripts and YAML (ansible) these days.
I started using Delphi in 2.0 times. It used to be a joy to develop with, incredibly rapid development, much much faster than Visual Basic (and better typing) or Visual C++ (which was a pain for the GUI with MFC or similar libraries). The huge ecosystem was also a big part of the value: there were lots of components, virtually for everything you could think of.
Around 2005-2012, .NET had already eaten a lot of the market. Many shops that used to develop components for Delphi were now developing for Delphi AND .NET, or had completely moved to .NET. The final blow was HTML5: by 2010, everybody has looking into web applications. By 2015, the web (website or Electron) was the de facto standard.
Qt and others also suffered from the same fate but Qt was able to survive due to embedded, lighter multiplatform, etc. We’ll see how long it lasts.
So who’s still using Delphi? Anybody who isn’t supporting legacy Delphi applications?
Are the new versions actually any good?
There is a lot of professional software still developed in Delphi, maybe nothing so thrilling but in many professional ambits (industry, transportation, ecc…) all other the world Delphi is still an option. I’ve been a professional Delphi developer for almost 13 years and I’m still missing its speed, clean approach and versatility.
I’ll stick to the Delphi 2, 3, 4, and 5 discs that I eBay’d for my retro-hobby collection. Those don’t have licenses that expire and need to be renewed every year.
…I just wish I could find and buy a REALbasic disc old enough to support running on my Power Mac G4 under Mac OS 9 and targeting 68k macs to occupy that middle-ground between HyperCard and CodeWarrior.
… OR just use Lazarus IDE and have a lot more built targets available.
I think this Community Editions are the answers to Visual Studio Community. The license is very similar.
Both can come with its own C++ Compiler. Both are primary for Windows. The IDE and compiler are only running on Windows, but Visual Studio can also be used to program for Linux and Mobile systems.
Sad, that there is no longer Kylix for Linux. A Community Edition of Kylix would be nice.
If you want to try a quite similar development experience but on a wider range of platform, you can check Lazarus https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ the opensource counterpart of Delphi. It runs confortably on Linux and Mac and, with some tricks, also to some other platform like Raspbian and Haiku. This is possible because the Freepascal compiler is available for a number of platform and Lazarus has its own library of graphic components that is called LCL (VCL is the name of Delphi’s one) that comes with an implementation for win32 but also Gnome and Qt. Maybe Lazarus lacks of hype in these modern times, but it’s robust, still in active development (for example a transpiler for javascript will be included in next releases) and a fully, lovable, community driven, open source project, for whom who cares, but OSnews is the right place…
I remember I played a bit with Borland Kylix on Linux. Later I had classes of object orientation with Delphi in Computer Science grade, and did learn how to actually use it; but Kylix was already dead at that time.
I’d be very careful with the Delphi Community Edition license.
It collects data about how you use the software, and if you run it from a domain belonging to a company whose revenue, according to their assessment, exceeds $5,000, they may send you a threatening letter demanding that you pay thousands of dollars.
This happened two years ago, so things may have improved since then.
I would stay well away from it.