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My main problem with delphi: it is "too proprietary". It was a very productive IDE in the 90's or early 2000's but lost their path and never recovered.

Some new versions broke compatibility with previous version's components. There was the case where you paid a good amount of money on some proprietary components and they simply wouldn't work in the next version: you were imprisoned in an obsolete IDE. By not being multi-platform (I heard it improved lately) you could only use it with/for win32 so it lost servers, embedded, cloud and mobile. By not being open-source nobody could improve it.

Then it had to compete with "native tools". Whoever develops for windows wouldn't quit ms' tools to use it, whoever develops for mac wouldn't quit apple's tools to use it, whoever develops for android wouldn't quit google's tools to use it, whoever develops for linux was mostly ignored after kylix.

Note that I didn't even mentioned price and license.

They improved it later, I heard. But seems more like the old case of too little too late. Most successful programming languages today are open source and multi-platform. Delphi was dependent on win32 for too long and it still is "too proprietary". You do the world a favor by porting your project to lazarus.



Delphi 7, that was a lovely vintage...


Delphi 7 was / is fantastic. Soon after that, they went .NET and the wheels came off.


I think it was C# with winforms that broke the last oppotunity delphi had.


Doesn't Lazarus address at least some of these concerns? (I don't think it's a drop in replacement though.)

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/


Mostly, although Lazarus has an incompatible ABI (LCLs vs VCLs). So legacy projects relient on third-party components don't benefit from it.


I don't mind trying Delphi again since they support mobile targets (Android & iOS). Too bad the IDE itself only runs on Windows...




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