alt Hacker NewsDelphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available
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I gave Delphi a shot, but after setting up my account I got a few phone calls a few days later about it to sell me on it. I was genuinely surprised companies still did that in 2024/2025.
My favourite Delphi program, and the one I learned to program with, was Dev-C++ (https://sourceforge.net/projects/dev-cpp). AFAIK there is a more recent fork, but I also clearly recall the 4.9.9.? versoin number from back then. It was very fast (including startup). I enjoyed it a lot back when I was still on Windows. Funny that Delphi was used to create a C/C++ IDE.
Last time I tried Delphi Community Edition, I had to give them my email just to download it, then when I tried any of the templates the IDE showed, it wouldn't build at all, don't show me a template if it doesn't work.
I received an email from someone asking how I was liking Delphi, I naively responded with my issue, but quickly realized he was just trying to sell Delphi. I would have bought Delphi over the years if they had a personal license for $99 or something, I am not investing thousands of dollars on a software where the free trial blows up out of the box (not intentionally it seemed).
Why would anyone use that over Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)?
I haven't heard of Delphi in ages. Where I grew up, I was the first generation to start high school with C++ as opposed to the previous ones who were stuck with Pascal. I believe I did some in university, but not much. Anyway, I am amused to find this news on HN. I spent some of the past 24 hours reading through — and trying to draw some conclusions out of — the Go vs Rust sword fights in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261133 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47222270 Mad respect for these guys not giving a funk.
So much has changed. I remember driving past the Borland HQ in Scotts Valley every day on my way to work. Delphi was so cool back then with the object oriented pascal.
I kinda miss Borland
Self-learning programming in the 90's went from DOS batch files => MS Basic => Turbo Pascal then Delphi 1. Out of all of those I had the best success understanding what I was doing in Delphi.
Also Delphi 1 had the coolest installer graphics.
I remember Pascal as a so tidy and clean language... And verbose. Very verbose... And calling win API was a horror
Borland should have made the language 100% free with a totally 100% free command line compiler and libraries.
Charge people for the IDE - everyone seems to hate paying for languages but be quite happy to pay for IDEs.
I'm an outsider, although I've heard cool things about Delphi. So, trying to find examples of what this looks like, I was naturally interested in the "Cool Apps" section. But my biggest surprise was that Beyond Compare was listed in there. I see that thing in a lot of Windows .NET shops, I always figured it was .NET-based (I guess I confused association with dependency?)
Unfortunately, if you intend on using Delphi, that will be $1200 plus $399 a year for the basic commercial license, and if you also intend on using databases, that will be $4600 plus $1399 a year. Or, you could use .NET, which is $0, and overwhelmingly better supported at this point.
Embarcadero is milking a shrinking captive market, VMWare style. It makes perfect financial sense given the asset, but it's unfortunate for those of us with happy memories of Delphi 6 and 7.
Delphi - almost effortless programming memories.
> ... native Delphi apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.
In early 2000s there was Borland Kylix for Linux. Thus today (25 years later), if I'd use Object Pascal, then with Lazarus.
Also Ekon 2026 is already announced with the respective program,
C++Builder as well? Any updates regarding cross-platform support?
A lot of the software I really admired in the early 2000s was developed by single persons using Delphi. It seems to me like there is (was?) something promoted by a Delphi environment that is rare to find elsewhere, that lets people (a) quickly prototype cool stuff, and then (b) sustainably grow it into a mature product as it gains users. I wish I cared enough to learn it, but there's so much else I need to learn first!