Delphi

Long-term owners

30 years after Delphi and VBA, we've only regressed in terms of truly integrated development environments

Feb 2026 · comment

I wrote back-office software in Delphi that ran for 15+ years without any maintenance or support.

Feb 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• JetBrains IDEsLong-time developers praise JetBrains IDEs for deep code intelligence, refactoring, navigation and debugging, but critics cite heavy resource use, buggy recent updates and clumsy AI integration.233recommend
• IntelliJ IDEAThe go-to IDE for Java and Kotlin, praised for built-in refactoring, code navigation and JVM debugging; the common complaint is heavy memory and resource use.206recommend
• Microsoft Visual StudioA full Windows IDE praised for its powerful C++ and C# debugger, code navigation and productive WinForms tooling, though many find it slow, bloated and pushy with Copilot.165recommend
• XcodeApple's free IDE, praised by long-time users for strong debugging tools and steadily improving AI agent support, though many find it buggy and tied to recent Macs and macOS.100recommend
• JetBrains RiderDevelopers, mostly on .NET, say it is faster and smoother than Visual Studio, especially on Linux and Mac. The most common caveat is subscription-only licensing.68recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 248 comments. Each links to the original.

1. there is just something special about older versions of Delphi and now Lazarus that makes it so much easier to write desktop software than most other frameworks

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Free Pascal compiler now supports dynamic packages”

2. Delphi had a powerful and easy to use GUI editor in the early 2000s, much less of a hassle compared to building software with Windows' own C++ API.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available”

3. Creating a simple application that had a database backend, data presentation gui and some simple CRUD logic took like 15-30 mins.

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Delphi is 31 years old – innovation timeline”

4. I still miss Turbo Pascal (and later Delphi) ... not so much the language, but the speed of feedback was unparalleled.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Borland Turbo Basic”

5. Even doing COM in Delphi/C++ Builder feels more ergonomic than any of Microsoft endless C++ frameworks for COM/WinRT.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available”

6. Delphi had a good thing going for a while, a ton of potential. But they pivoted themselves out of that real fast...

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “PascalABC.net”

7. WinForms was probably the closest thing since Visual Basic (and Delphi) in terms of rapid prototyping of a GUI.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Show HN: C# Game Engine with its own scripting language and IDE”

8. the really nice part is the ability to make things by dragging and dropping visual and non visual components

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The C3 Programming Language”

9. the tooling available in C++ Builder, Delphi, VB 6, C++/CX (WinRT is basically COM with extras) also great.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “C Isn't a Language”

10. The RAD environment makes it insanely quick and easy to throw together a reasonably functional desktop app.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available”

11. what Delphi always excelled at was being able to quickly click together a GUI (with a WYSIWYG UI designer)

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE”

12. Ironically it is still easier in Delphi than the frameworks Microsoft keeps pouring out for .NET and C++.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers”

13. It is incredibly easy to use / develop with and single exe no dependencies deployment mode is superior.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Windows native app development is a mess”

14. a cross platform dev environment that addresses all these problems and compiles in less than a second

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The C3 Programming Language”

15. nowadays there is no non-AI way to build a whole UI app in on afternoon like with Delphi/C++ Builder

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot”

16. The VCL (WinAPI wrapper plus very extensible for custom controls) behaves 'natively' because it is.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Native all the way, until you need text”

17. You could whip up decently usable UI in Delphi far quicker than similar one in any TUI framework.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Why TUIs Are Back”

18. Pascal/Lazarus/Delphi strike such a nice balance of responsiveness in the development lifecycle

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Free Pascal compiler now supports dynamic packages”

19. there's nothing quite like it in terms of the efficiency of getting deliverables to customers

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Blaise – A modern self-hosting zero-legacy Object Pascal compiler targeting QBE”

20. hiring people who want to learn or know Delphi is hard, so off to C# we trundle forward

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Delphi is 31 years old – innovation timeline”

21. And they have spywares in their IDE and if they even think for a second that you're using the trial software in an unauthorized way, their lawyers will threaten you.

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available”

22. Borland should have made the language 100% free with a totally 100% free command line compiler and libraries.

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available”

23. Delphi's rotten web implementations frustrate developers and developers are easily porting to free JS tools

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Porting from Delphi to JavaScript, will unalive your blog from Delphi RSS Sites”

24. It's 90's tech. Their business model is selling expensive subscriptions to keep legacy projects alive.

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available”

25. Delphi and Qt are dead for companies that do not have at least one lawyer on retainer

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available”

26. Delphi did not look into Ada either, but they looked into .NET instead, and that made Delphi not as great, but better than Free Pascal.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available”

27. The best cognitive impedance matches happened a while ago, when Visual Basic 6 and Delphi for Windows first came out.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “LLMs could be, but shouldn't be compilers”

28. There were flexible layout container components which helped a lot when adapting forms to varying screen resolutions.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “.NET MAUI is coming to Linux and the browser”

29. It is still a fantastic IDE to build native UI apps and I don't see a reason why Rust couldn't be used the same way.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Ratatui – App Showcase”

30. The web-esq interface approach is far harder than it needs to be for small applications with basic interfaces.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Delphi 13.1 Released, with ARM64 support”

31. windows was arguably more friendly for casual developers than Linux with things like Visual Basic and Delphi

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Are consumers just tech debt to Microsoft?”

32. I use both for desktop applications but as an IDE and for debugging in particular Lazarus is behind Delphi.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available”

33. 30 years after Delphi and VBA, we've only regressed in terms of truly integrated development environments

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “What Claude Code Chooses”

34. A lot of the software I really admired in the early 2000s was developed by single persons using Delphi.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available”

35. I think it's quite an accomplishment to survive in the modern world of free software development tools.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Delphi 13.1 Released, with ARM64 support”

36. Yes, you can build cross-platform GUI apps with Delphi. However, that requires using Firemonkey (FMX).

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Win32 is the stable Linux ABI”

37. We should give Go, C++ and Rust folks a few copies of Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS, and Delphi current.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Turbo Vision 2.0 – a modern port”

38. You could have built the same thing in VB6 or Delphi with less effort and used less of my resources

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Most people prefer traditional architecture”

39. I wrote back-office software in Delphi that ran for 15+ years without any maintenance or support.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Delphi is 31 years old – innovation timeline”

40. Delphi was used for tons of RAD software in the 90's, both for the enterprise and for home users

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “The 1987 Game "The Last Ninja" was 40 kilobytes”