Sad, because I still have a soft spot in my heart for Delphi.
I've never found bettern tool for building desktop GUI apps so easily. I've dropped Delphi back in 2010, moved to Java and tried the web/mobile world but nothing comes close to that top-notch quality.
Irony of destiny: Any app compiled with Borland Delphi is instantly multiplatform because they run beautifuly on Linux and OSX when WINE is installed there.
Here's where I'll add: it's really weird to me that Embarcadero now owns Ultra-Edit.
"Embarcadero is very happy to announce RAD Studio 13 Florence along with Delphi 13
and C++Builder 13 is available to customers starting today. The RAD Studio 13
Florence release offers a 64-bit version of the RAD Studio IDE, an updated C++Builder
Clang compiler, Delphi language extensions, AI components, an AI companion, along with
a number of enhancements of existing features, and a significant focus on quality."RAD Studio is kind of the closet experience to VB6 where you simply drop controls on a form and can easily wire it up.. with a much better language.
The tools were/are too expensive and Microsoft pile drove them from early dominance to niche by undercutting them handily, and it's been extractive rather than growth oriented since. There is the Lazarus/FreePascal project which offers an alternative.
And hiring Anders Hejlsberg
Bad management, bad decisions, bad products (Delphi 7 was peak). MS had nothing to do with that. And I'm sure Anders made a right move to abandon the sinking ship.
I'm still pissed at Borland for all those bad moves.
It is still probably the best drag and drop experience for UI components, with Qt Creator being a runner up.
A bit shame, as most likely the popularity declined due to draconial licencing model at the time. Now they have Delphi Community edition, which is free.
If you have some free time, try it, you won't regret it. Especially good for hobby projects.
After all these years, I still use WinForms for prototyping, nothing faster comes to mind. If I need a mockup to show to my manager in 15 minutes, nothing beats WinForms.
brightball•1h ago
Talked to a dev who was an advocate for it some years back.
ivan_gammel•1h ago
I myself now prefer to build admin tools on Java/Swing, because it’s much faster and easier than building a web app (Claude Code does that job quite well). Delphi probably offers even better dev.speed/quality/UX.
johannes1234321•57m ago
Of course there is electron, but that has its own set of complications.
For simple tools RAD is great.
drob518•1h ago