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I loved Turbo Pascal, but to me the high point of Borland's tooling was Delphi (1995). I don't want to sound like old man yells at cloud, but every time someone says that building GUIs with Electron is so easy compared to native apps, I just wished they experienced Delphi in its prime.

There are some very short/simple demos on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_3K_0vjUhk



> but every time someone says that building GUIs with Electron is so easy compared to native apps, I just wished they experienced Delphi in its prime.

Every time someone says that, I mention Lazarus. I stll get a thrill out of using it (one of my github projects is a C library, and the GUI app is in Lazarus, which calls into the API to do everything).

The problem I find with Lazarus is that it seems to be slowly dying; yes, they still work on it, but feature-wise they are very behind what can be done with HTML+CSS and a handful of js utility functions.

A wealthy benefactor could very quickly get Lazarus to the point of doing all the eye-candy extras that HTML+CSS let you do (animated elements, for example).


Looks pretty similar to C# WinForms that ships with Visual Studio. https://youtu.be/n5WneLo6vOY?si=maped85dMX90KIn1


They can still experience it today with the community edition.


If you can agree to their very strange terms and conditions.

Or, use Lazarus/Free Pascal, which is almost identical, except for the documentation, which needs a massive overhaul, in tooling and content.


Not everyone is religious against such agreements.

Those can profit from very latest version.


If you make gears, for example, and sell more than $5000 of gears, you still have to pay for Delphi under that license... it's really weird.


I will happily fill an hour with trash talking Microsoft, but getting the father of Delphi on board is one of the shrewdest things they’ve managed. I wish he’d found a different project to sink his teeth into though.




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