Delphi turns 30 – The dead live longer

Delphi? – Almost every IT person knows Delphi, the older ones will have come into direct contact with it at some point in their lives and the younger ones will have at least heard of it, usually in a context such as: "There's probably still some old Delphi code in there". Today, on Valentine's Day, the programming language is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary – iX Developer congratulates.

Why is there still Delphi in everything (by the way, in the USA, the language is called Delph-ei, not Delph-i)? – The language has always been technically modern, object-oriented from an early stage, easy to use with databases, designed for networks and equipped with many libraries. It also soon had a sophisticated IDE that served as a model for many subsequent ones. "The real innovation was to provide a powerful programming environment with a user-friendly GUI designer instead of a class library, as well as an optimizing compiler, a debugger and a database access API," recalls David Intersimone, one of the founding fathers at Borland, in an interview with heise.

Pascal was easy to learn and easy to understand – without sacrificing complexity. And because it was easy to learn, it was taught a lot (the author himself took his first serious programming steps with Turbo Pascal) and gained a firm foothold in the school and university environment.

The steeply ascending and later rather eventful history of Delphi began in 1985 with Object Pascal, an object-oriented Pascal extension to which Pascal inventor Niklas Wirth also contributed. The Swiss computer scientist and winner of the Turing Award died last year at the age of 89. In 1986, software manufacturer Borland introduced the first object-oriented features in its Turbo Pascal, the first integrated development environment to combine editor, compiler, debugger etc. in one tool. The first versions were available for the Macintosh, and from 1989 also for DOS.

The following example shows Object Pascal:

program ObjectPascalExample;

type
    THelloWorld = class
    public
        procedure Greet;
    end;

procedure THelloWorld.Greet;
begin
    Writeln('Hello, World!');
end;

var
    HelloWorld: THelloWorld;            { impliziter Zeiger }
begin
    HelloWorld := THelloWorld.Create;   { Konstruktor gibt einen Zeiger auf eine Instanz der Klasse THelloWorld zurück }

    try
        HelloWorld.Greet;
    finally
        HelloWorld.Free;                { Freigeben der Instanz }
    end;
end.

Delphi is a child of Windows

With the first Windows version of Turbo Pascal, Borland changed the name: Delphi was born thirty years ago today. The choice of name, the Greek oracle, was an intended reference to Oracle, the database. Danny Thorpe, one of the people involved, writes of a "strategic decision to make database tools and connectivity a central focus of the new product."

Delphi 1 only generated code for 16-bit applications under Windows 3.x and limited the size of all data types to a maximum of 64 kilobytes and strings to 255 characters. Delphi 2 (1996) extended this to 32-bit applications and 2 gigabytes for data structures and character strings. Borland subsequently expanded both the language with new functions and the IDE with additional tools.

From Delphi 7 and 8 (2002/2003), a compiler for .NET and its IDE were added. With Delphi 2005 (already in fall 2004) Borland unites the IDEs as Borland Developer Studio. C++ is introduced in 2006, with Borland continuing to sell C++Builder as an independent product.

Signs of decay characterize the late years

The further history of Delphi disintegrates into sub-versions, spin-offs and finally company sales and takeovers. In 2006, Borland spun off its developer division into CodeGear, which was bought by Embarcadero for 24 million US dollars in 2008. At the same time, Borland itself unsuccessfully marketed the Turbo line, which contained individual IDEs for Delphi, .NET etc., even in free versions. The Pascal-Delphi complex came under increasing pressure from Visual Studio and open source.

The database specialist Embarcadero –, known for Rapid SQL –, continued the development of Delphi for seven years: Delphi XE2 added a 64-bit Windows compiler and XE5 (2013) an ARM compiler for Android. Version XE6 (2014, the naming of Delphi versions is a science in itself) finally supports cloud services. For a while, Embarcadero unsuccessfully offered Delphi Prism as a standalone product, which was not Pascal, but a .NET extension for Visual Studio that also supported Mono for Linux and macOS programs.

In 2015, Idera, also a database specialist, bought Embarcadero and continued to develop Delphi under the Embarcadero brand. However, Idera integrated Rapid SQL into its portfolio. The latest update 2 for Delphi 12 Athens from September 12, 2024 introduces an API for AI co-pilots. Delphi is alive! – not just a problem with Legacay refactoring. Or is it?

Is it still alive or is it already undead?

Is Delphi alive? – David Intersimone says in the heise interview, yes! "Of course, people always wonder how long a particular technology will live. However, I believe that successful products live a very, very long time. In the case of Delphi, for example, you could still use your Delphi 2 license as usual – and it won't be deactivated." A version with the internal number DB30 is on the roadmap ("coming sometime in 2025") and there is speculation in the forums that it will be released as Delphi 13 or Delphi 30 on the anniversary, i.e. perhaps today.

Since 2018, Delphi has been available as genuine freeware, which hardly differs from the Pro Edition under the name Community Edition and only excludes companies whose annual turnover exceeds 5000 US dollars. Free Pascal has been available since 1997 as a free compiler under a GPL license, on which OmniPascal and Lazarus –, the – brought back from the dead, are based.

While OmniPascal offers a plug-in for Visual Studio Code, Lazarus comes as a complete IDE in the style of Delphi and offers a similar component structure. And it enjoys a lively community. For example, one reader writes in the heise forum: "I really don't know of anything that combines everything or with which you can quickly pull up a GUI while writing CPU-near high-performance multi-threaded code."

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