Delphi turns 30!

February 14, 2025

Time flies, and Delphi turns 30 today!

It was late in autumn of 1994, and I remember it as if it was today. A programmer friend of mine showed a beta version of a program called AppBuilder. It featured a modern IDE (at least for that time, back in Windows 3.1 days), and a fast compiler based on Pascal code!

AppBuilder was developed by Borland, and would a few months later be released as Delphi (they apparently did not keep the working name)! Little did I at that moment imagine that this product should change the life of thousands or even millions of programmers! It would also impact my development life in a good way.

After the release, it soon became clear that Delphi was superior to Visual Basic, which at that time was Microsoft’s solution for rapid application development. To have a strongly typed language and a compiler in Delphi was such an advantage!

When Delphi was first released, I was quick to start using it, and have not stopped ever since. Almost every day it brings a lot of productivity for me while working on our products Pascal Analyzer, Pascal Browser and Pascal Expert!

Here are just some of the selling points for Delphi, which I appreciate:

  • Mature language with lots of capabilities
  • Strong framework with RTL/VCL
  • Ability to compile for many platforms: Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, Linux etc
  • Good eco-system, lots of open source and commercial code available
  • Strong continuity, no breaking changes
  • Fast executables, even possible to use assembly code

I also want to highlight a feature that is quite unique for Object Pascal, but has not got much attention. That is local functions/procedures. I use them a lot, especially for small utility functions inside a larger code block.

It is better to keep them within the context in which they are used, and not expose them to all other code in the unit. It even makes your code clearer since you can break it down in smaller bits. In most other languages, this feature of local functions/procedures is not available, at least not in an easy way.

To celebrate the birthday, we give 30% discount on all our products. This is in addition to other discounts. Make sure to use the campaign code "DELPHI30" when ordering any of our products to get 30% discount! This offer is valid until the end of February 2025.

Note that if you already own a license for Pascal Analyzer 9.x, Pascal Expert or Pascal Browser 3.x, but your support plan has expired:
You can renew your support plan at any time, regardless of when your current support plan expired! The support plan will be valid from the date of purchase.

For more licensing information and to order, goto our ordering page.