Delphi in the Age of AI
28 comments
·August 23, 2025siva7
Delphi -> C# -> Typescript.
This is the evolution. It has never been easier to make apps just by using a browser that runs on all platforms.
haolez
As a former Delphi developer, this is very far from truth, in my experience. Nothing modern beats the ease of RAD with Delphi, where you had actually business people making complex software (with a huge amount of tech debt, of course).
I'm not saying it's better - Delphi sucks for a lot of reasons - but this is the only aspect where it really shines.
snapcaster
In the age of AI, i'm never using obscure languages again because AI isn't as good with them
massung
By that logic, if modern LLMs existed in the 80s, you’d have never learned Haskell, Ocaml, Rust, Go, Erlang, … and all the cool concepts and ideas that came with them. You’d still be programming Basic and Fortran, simply because that’s all the models knew.
AI may be helpful at times, but to limit one’s self to only the knowledge and experience they have is… short sighted at best.
3036e4
I tried to make some LLMs write (GW-)BASIC and they failed miserably. Maybe they were only trained on some modern BASIC that doesn't look like BASIC at all? Could not convince them to use line numbers at all. Maybe with a lot of context they could do it, but my prompts did not work, even making I clear I wanted line numbers.
(Free)Pascal seems to work great though. I think enough of that is in training data that it can be used as well as any language. There isn't much special to consider to get it right. It is not like figuring out how to do Rust or C++.
coliveira
Unfortunately this is what AI is leading to. People will stop learning new languages and companies will stop developing new ones because AI is now supposed to write code.
pjmlp
I agree, I envison that we will reach a state where the tooling will be generating executables directly.
As next step of low code/no code tooling, the agent will do the actions for us.
We are already seeing this on SaaS offerings.
johnisgood
Feed it documentation and example code and given sufficient data of these, it will do just fine with obscure languages. I have tried it with programming languages as obscure as Odin, for example, and it worked nicely. It is way more awful writing Forth, for one. YMMV.
nolok
Object pascal is many things, obscure it is not
StableAlkyne
Probably depends on your specific company or industry
Personally I've never seen anyone use Pascal as anything other than the butt of a joke or a background slide on "how far we've come" since the 80s. Nobody even seems to remember object Pascal.
... But I'm also in a sector that routinely relies on Fortran code so ymmv
pjmlp
Ever heard of Mac OS and a company called Apple?
adinhitlore
It's exploding, just look at my post history if you will i just asked about it yesterday that it climbed from 183 to 10th place in the tiobe index in just 5 years! It's absurd, I don't hate it but the 'oject pascal' is just too alien if you come from C, C++ or even C#/java or even PHP background. In fact I don't even know what it resembles? Is it fortran? ok, i googled it: so it's simula, I mean if we pretend object pascal = Delphi and they are very similar or the same thing, right? Is anyone using Simula in 2025? It's not an easy learning path...but I'm not against it, hope it becomes alternative to the "C"-influenced languages.
gerardatkonvo
As much as I love Object Pascal (it was my first programing language) it has no reason to exist in 2025 other than legacy applications and small RAD windows programs.
pjmlp
Ironically Delphi and C++ Builder are in a much better shape than Microsoft stacks in what concerns Windows applications.
They are the main product, not something that is seen as cost center nowadays.
Also they cross compile to all major desktop and mobile OSes.
master-lincoln
Strong opinion, but no evidence provided.
andsoitis
> and small RAD windows programs.
You can also use Delphi to produce Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux apps. All from single code base.
3036e4
FreePascal, that I believe is supposed to be reasonably Delphi compatible, supports "Intel x86 (16 and 32 bit), AMD64/x86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, SPARC, SPARC64, ARM, AArch64, MIPS, Motorola 68k, AVR, and the JVM. Supported operating systems include Windows (16/32/64 bit, CE, and native NT), Linux, Mac OS X/iOS/iPhoneSimulator/Darwin, FreeBSD and other BSD flavors, DOS (16 bit, or 32 bit DPMI), OS/2, AIX, Android, Haiku, Nintendo GBA/DS/Wii, AmigaOS, MorphOS, AROS, Atari TOS, and various embedded platforms. Additionally, support for RISC-V (32/64), Xtensa, and Z80 architectures, and for the LLVM compiler infrastructure is available in the development version. Additionally, the Free Pascal team maintains a transpiler for pascal to Javascript called pas2js."
You do not get that much portability with many other languages. C, perhaps. But FreePascal has a bigger standard library and many other libraries that support many platforms. It is also a much safer language with checked array bounds and while there is support for low level unsafe things you do not have to use those nearly as often as in C. And while the compiler might not be as fast as Turbo Pascal (or Delphi?) it is still amazingly fast compared to any other compiler I have used this century.
What's not to like? Guess the lack of attention from developers and potential risk of there not being enough around to maintain it? I honestly do not know, but you do not hear much about it and not many projects seem to use it.
DanielHB
Lazarus (kinda of a Delphi clone that also uses Object Pascal) is probably the best way to make cross platform native desktop applications that actually uses the native GUI toolkit for each platform.
I hear it is quite popular for creating GUIs wrappers for CLI tools.
evrennetwork
[dead]
CodeCompost
Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.
1899-12-30
Delphi sucks, I don't recommend anybody use it when you could just use c#.
nolok
I hardly disagree with the first part of your statement, but the second half it should be noted that Microsoft hired the designer in chief of the delphi language at the time to design c#
pjmlp
Actually he went to Microsoft based on referrals from ex-Borland working at Microsoft.
From his own words, https://behindthetech.libsynpro.com/001-anders-hejlsberg-a-c...
lo_zamoyski
Some make the case that making basic UIs has actually regressed since Delphi/Visual Basic.
ACCount37
"Make basic UIs easily" is a major appeal of C# workflows in the usual CRUD-type development.
When I converted to Mormonism last year, I met an older missionary couple and bonded with the husband over our love for programming. He's a Delphi developer who supports legacy applications. He's had a lot of trouble finding work, but doesn't feel equipped to learn any modern stack. I think his wife is selling clothes online to support themselves.