Delphi in the Age of AI
81 pointsby andsoitis26 days ago85 comments(learndelphi.org)
Comments (14)
simonw•22 days ago
Please, please don't ever start a technical article with anything that reads like this:
> Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most fascinating and rapidly-growing areas of computer science. Although still in its early stages, AI has already started to revolutionize the world we live in, with applications in everything from self-driving cars to medical diagnosis.
tux3•21 days ago
Counterpoint: I'd rather find out in the first paragraph. If this whole article is going to be a fluffy slop-slathered delve, save me time.
sdsd•22 days ago
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.
mickeyp•22 days ago
Yes, that sounds like a Delphi developer alright.
I worked with Delphi personally and professionally for many, many years. You were at the precipice of unemployment in the 2000s if you used it then. To do it now? You're like a looney toons character suspended in mid-air. There's Delphi work around, to be sure, but you're competing against people with 30 years of commercial experience building -- or rather just keeping them limping along -- today, and they are as desperate as the Powerbuilder, Oracle Forms, FoxPro and Lotus Domino folk in scratching out an income in a stagnant pool.
Delphi died an ignominious death a long time ago, and it is truly sad. I miss it; frontend development today is a joke compared to what we could do with Delphi. But so what? It's dead. And it's not coming back.
baranul•21 days ago
Last time checked, Delphi (Object Pascal) is ranked #10 on the TIOBE index (August 2025). People get all hot and bothered by Rust and others, yet they are still way behind on the charts.
Yeah, Delphi is not in the top 5, but is clearly very far from dead. Especially in comparison to the untold number of languages and companies out there.
mickeyp•21 days ago
Care to show me a job board bursting at the seams with Delphi jobs?
baranul•21 days ago
Delphi/Object Pascal is taught in many places around the world and its usage depends on the country. Because Delphi/Object Pascal is not so popular in your or a specific country, does not mean its not more popular somewhere else. More people and companies use Delphi than many realize, that's why they are still in business.
Object Pascal can also be transpiled into other languages, where people are not aware of what the original code was written in. For instance, Russia makes wide usage of PascalABC, which compiles/uses .NET. There is also Oxygene (RemObjects), that can compile to .NET too.
Popularity and usage does not equate exactly to the job market. For instance Scratch is more popular and widely used than Rust, because of its reach with the young and schools. And, many jobs can ask for programming skills, like knowing Python (which boosts its ranking). But they are often asking for that language as a supplement or plus, not as the main reason why they are hiring a person.
pjmlp•20 days ago
In Germany, https://www.jobworld.de/Delphi-jobs
Plus upcoming conference, https://entwickler-konferenz.de/en/
ivraatiems•21 days ago
Why doesn't he feel equipped? Is it an age/speed-of-learning thing, or more of a, there's too many new concepts and not enough time?
Genuinely asking, not trying to be snarky. My prior assumption is typically that a capable engineer in one language or stack can learn another relatively easily.
gcanyon•22 days ago
He should have a look at Filemaker -- it's an active product with customers that need help (last time I checked) and owned by Apple, so it's not going anywhere for at least a bit longer. The dev environment is at a similar level -- I think, I'm not that familiar with Delphi.
egorfine•22 days ago
> but doesn't feel equipped to learn any modern stack
why?
hippo22•21 days ago
[dead]
seif_madc•21 days ago
As a programmer, and not as a company seeking profit by any means, i seek the easiest and most reliable solution for the problem in hand, and Delphi works like a charm for me, and it is very very far from dead, by the time of writing this, on the TOIBE index , Delphi is at the 10th place, Rust and Kotlin are #18 and #19 respectively, oh look, even Ada is ranked #13, so yeah,please stop saying a programming language is dead because it is old or not your favorite or simply because you don't know anything about programming languages except Javascript.
mickeyp•21 days ago
Uh-huh. There are zero -- sorry, nil -- Delphi jobs on jobserve in the UK. That is one of the leading job sites in the UK. Zero. There are 282 jobs with python in the job description.
baranul•21 days ago
The world is a much bigger place than only the UK. Delphi usage was and is not only about a single location. And, a Delphi/Object Pascal programmer can work remotely, know other languages too, or be a freelancer.
pjmlp•20 days ago
Currently 296 open positions in Germany, https://www.jobworld.de/Delphi-jobs
vslira•22 days ago
This last week I've been receiving emails from Embarcadero (I can't recall ever registering on their site, but it's possible that I did in the quarter century I've been online) so, together with this post, I suppose management is doing some marketing push.
adinhitlore•22 days ago
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.
siva7•22 days ago
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•22 days ago
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.
ndiddy•22 days ago
Have you tried WinForms? It’s a similar workflow to Delphi except I find C# a lot nicer to work with than Pascal. WPF is also good if you need a program that’s more flexible with being resized, but you have to do your layout in XML rather than drag and drop (although you do still get live updates of what your window will look like while you’re writing the XML).
pjmlp•21 days ago
It is not exactly the same, because even with all improvements taken out from Midori learnings, C# is not on the same C++ like league as Delphi happens to be.
So with VCL/FireMonkey, you get all the RAD like tooling that VB/Delphi are famous for, full AOT, and low level systems programming capabilities, including inline Assembly.
pkphilip•22 days ago
I am not sure WinForms is as flexible as Delphi - especially when you need to write your own components with their own property sheet dialogs etc.
Also, Delphi apps can be made to run on Linux, Mac and even Android and IOS.
azinman2•22 days ago
The drag and drop is what makes it good.
Interface builder had that on macOS; that’s basically dead now. I feel like Visual Basic had that too? I don’t know if that still exists.
frou_dh•21 days ago
"Dead" is a bit strong, no? More like de-emphasised for newcomers, and in maintenance mode?
kwanbix•22 days ago
What lots of reasons make Delphi suck? Genuine question.
haolez•22 days ago
From what I remember:
- the IDE was unstable and crashed a lot
- the license was very expensive and the commercial relationship felt predatory
- new features got added all the time, while long standing bugs weren't prioritized (e.g., mobile apps support)
In the C++ variant (a combination of C++ with Delphi wrappers):
- the compiler(!!) was unstable and crashed a lot, where you had to make small irrelevant changes to your code to make it compile without crashing itself
In general:
- the overall culture around it seemed to attract developers without concern for technical debt, which maybe was a consequence of Delphi's own strengths; i.e., every Delphi project was a big ball of mud that you had to fight against
MehdiHK•22 days ago
That's the author's (Anders Hejlsberg) journey of these programming languages. Doesn't need to be evolution though.
sharts•22 days ago
Seems more like devolution. Mass appeal is rarely a sign of evolutionary progress.
wolvesechoes•22 days ago
Another example that it is a fallacy to equate evolution with progress.
snapcaster•22 days ago
In the age of AI, i'm never using obscure languages again because AI isn't as good with them
massung•22 days ago
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.
_the_inflator•22 days ago
You got a point here however I would just flip his argument. It is best to rely on LLMs that have a lot of training data exposure, and here is Python etc. dominating over Delphi.
I for example find LLMs not useful in regards to coding on 6510 or 68000 especially in assembler when developing code for a product of the demo scene.
x86 became pretty useful lately, but still, on certain machines with bit manipulation, you would better take your time to triple check your code and don't rely on LLM.
I would love to see a change here.
coliveira•22 days ago
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•22 days ago
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.
3036e4•22 days ago
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++.
snapcaster•22 days ago
You might be right. Have you seriously considered that you're wrong though? What if you're investing a dead craft and it never pays off? have you engaged with that idea and rejected it?
massung•22 days ago
There’s two sides to your question, I think:
- professionally (for money) - personally (for knowledge’s sake)
Regarding the former, I’m nearing retirement age, so personally I don’t care as much; I’m no longer “investing [in] a dead craft”. Assuming it is dead (I don’t think it is).
Re the latter, I have rejected it. I love problem solving. And I consider programming a tool I use to solve problems. Regardless of whether it’s an LLM or my old C text book, if I limited myself to only what came before me, then I can’t possibly improve on the current situation. My solutions would be in a perpetual state of stagnation. I can’t speak for others, but that sounds boring AF to me.
hiAndrewQuinn•21 days ago
So then it's a life stage thing. You're already well established in your career, and you'd rather some intellectual engagement. There's nothing wrong with that.
A 22 year old fresh out of undergrad almost certainly wants actual money far more than they want intellectual engagement. Most of them are better served by picking up a boring workhorse language that they can reliably get paid to write. Inevitably some will speciate into more esoteric fields, but that's the exception, not the rule.
add-sub-mul-div•22 days ago
People wanting shortcuts and to do less work/thinking is about to become the major force in society over the next generation.
azinman2•22 days ago
Cheaper but worse unfortunately will win in most cases.
At least it’ll eventually become easier to distinguish oneself with something better. You’ll just always be slower.
johnisgood•22 days ago
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.
werdnapk•22 days ago
Reinforces the A in AI... "artificial" intelligence. Actual intelligence could pick up a new language no problem.
yndoendo•22 days ago
Programming languages are tools in a toolbox. Use the proper tool for the job instead of always picking up the hammer.
It takes time to train and use a new tool. That applies to LLM and humans. Would you use the same drill to hang drywall and core through a concrete floor?
nolok•22 days ago
Object pascal is many things, obscure it is not
StableAlkyne•22 days ago
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
baranul•21 days ago
People were not laughing at Turbo Pascal or Delphi when they came out, and they dominated for many years. Delphi/Object Pascal is still taught in the schools of many countries.
There are people who want everyone to forget Delphi/Object Pascal and they wish it was dead. But what they wish for and reality are two different things. Delphi still makes money, otherwise they wouldn't sell it.
pjmlp•22 days ago
Ever heard of Mac OS and a company called Apple?
ndiddy•22 days ago
It lasted for a few years as a first-class supported language, but by the early 90s they shifted most of their focus to C++ so the system API being in Pascal became more of a legacy annoyance than anything. You got to deal with Str255 types, putting "\p" at the start of all your string literals, remembering the rules for when to pass by reference or pass by value when you call toolbox functions, etc.
pjmlp•22 days ago
The fact is that without Object Pascal, there would not exist employees to work on MPW at all, or even Apple most likely.
Maybe in some alternative universe they would have been just as successful using BCPL, but the fact C and C++ were ignored at Apple until some employees came up with MPW as side project until it was too late to turn back, speaks volumes about Apple culture.
Just as it does the way A/UX was originally designed.
ndiddy•22 days ago
Apple officially supported C for Macintosh application development even back when they were still making devs do all their work on Lisas (see http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/workshop_3.0/Lisa_Wo...), but you're right that they were a majority Pascal shop until they shifted to C++ around when System 7 came out.
pjmlp•21 days ago
It did, as userspace tooling for customers, the system was written in a mix of Assembly and Clascal, Object Pascal predecessor.
maleldil•22 days ago
Is Pascal still used on macOS today? Pascal/Delphi was relevant 20 years ago, but it isn't anymore.
pjmlp•22 days ago
Of course not, because that wasn't what I wrote.
I wrote Mac OS, which was replaced by OS X.
macOS is a rebranding from OS X.
Delphi is pretty much relevant in Germany, to this day there are conferences to attend to.
You can still get tickets for this year,
•22 days ago
panki27•22 days ago
Some things never die. I'm pretty sure the Borland Database Engine that came with Delphi 7 ('97?) still runs on Windows 11.
zeroc8•21 days ago
Nobody writes Win32 desktop apps anymore. That is Delphi's main problem.
pjmlp•21 days ago
Yes they do, for example https://www.lab-services.nl/en/home
zeroc8•20 days ago
Yes, of course, it's not completely dead yet.
But very few new native Windows business applications are being written. That's why there are no jobs, no investment, no fresh blood.
The old guard is hanging on until they can retire. But that's pretty much it.
Which is a shame. Delphi to this day has been my favorite dev environment ever.
baranul•21 days ago
The world is a big place. Many people and companies do things differently. And if it was really a problem or not profitable for Delphi, they would stop. That speaks for itself.
gerardatkonvo•22 days ago
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.
DanielHB•22 days ago
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.
lelanthran•21 days ago
Yup. If you write your tool as mostly library with the main function just calling into your .so/.dll then the work to make a gui version of your program is minimal.
See this example: https://github.com/lelanthran/frame/blob/master/frame-browse...
dardeaup•22 days ago
Yes! The combination of fpc, LCL, and Lazarus running on Windows/macOS/Linux is a powerful combination.
TedDallas•21 days ago
HeidiSQL is written with Lazarus/FPC.
sharts•22 days ago
If only mobile was possible too
DanielHB•21 days ago
I never tried but on their website they show screenshots of lazarus apps running in android/ios.
pjmlp•22 days ago
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•22 days ago
Strong opinion, but no evidence provided.
gerardatkonvo•22 days ago
What kind of evidence do you want? I wrote Delphi for years and I'm now a Typescript developer. Is there any current major software written in Delphi?
The most important ones I found are the windows MySQL GUI, Cheat Engine and Total Commander. I genuinely was searching for more than 10 minutes and everything else is either abandonware or has been rewritten to a different language.
lelanthran•21 days ago
> Is there any current major software written in Delphi?
That is not evidence for "no reason to exist".
The major reason for Delphi and/or Lazarus and/or Qt and/or similar WYSIWYG tool to exist is "when you want to produce a cross platform GUI application using a drag-and-drop form builder."
The fact that I can write a chat application that uses 30MB of RAM at runtime instead of 800MB like electron does is just icing on the cake.
zerocharge•22 days ago
wolvesechoes•22 days ago
What important software is written in TS outside the SaaS crapware and libraries that enable it?
seanssel•22 days ago
Inno Setup
andsoitis•22 days ago
> and small RAD windows programs.
You can also use Delphi to produce Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux apps. All from single code base.
3036e4•22 days ago
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.
andsoitis•21 days ago
I’ve tried Lazarus a few times (on macOS), but I’ve found Delphi to be significantly more polished and reliable (including the more complex workflow of developing on Windows and running the resulting binary on macOS or in the iOS simulator — it just works).
I did consider becoming a contributor to make Lazarus better, so maybe something I should revisit.
The first thing I’d do is make sure Lazarus works perfectly on Windows, macOS, and Linux. For the other platforms, fpc excellence is fine, but they’re not important enough, I think, for Lazarus. One counter argument might be certain embedded applications but I suspect that would not be the right prioritization…
maest•21 days ago
This page looks like AI slop. I don't understand what I'm supposed to get out of it.
CodeCompost•22 days ago
Delphi is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.
evrennetwork•22 days ago
[dead]
1899-12-30•22 days ago
Delphi sucks, I don't recommend anybody use it when you could just use c#.
nolok•22 days ago
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•22 days ago
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...
andsoitis•22 days ago
> Microsoft hired the designer in chief of the delphi language at the time to design c#
... and Anders Hejlsberg continues to be the lead architect of C# and is also core developer of TypeScript!
pjmlp•22 days ago
C# lead architect is Mads Torgersen. Anders Hejlsberg nowadays only has a consulting role.
lo_zamoyski•22 days ago
Some make the case that making basic UIs has actually regressed since Delphi/Visual Basic.
ACCount37•22 days ago
"Make basic UIs easily" is a major appeal of C# workflows in the usual CRUD-type development.
pjmlp•21 days ago
Yes, back in the Windows Form days, since then is a bit of schzophrenic status down at Redmon, that only developers with long backgrounds in the Windows development history can make sense of, and even so we're kind of lost on how much they still care, versus Azure/XBox (ecosystem not only console)/Office.