Delphi is up-to-date
A lot of people are misled by stereotypes telling that Delphi is as old as the hills and that the history of Delphi has stopped with the era of “Delphi 7”. Especially young people, being extremely vulnerable to the marketing influence of Delphi competitors, have a very controversial opinion about Delphi. Nevertheless, all these stereotypes are just stereotypes. Delphi can compete in the modern market and is able to win this competition with many development tools. Embarcadero is continuously developing and improving Delphi and RAD Studio.
Rich UI
Delphi is one of the best development tools for creating native Win32/Win64 applications with rich UI. Using Delphi you will have a low-level machine code ready for execution. You won’t need to use any additional compiling or execution layers as for .NET, Java or JavaScript (Electron). You may have some doubts whether it matters. But it really does! For Embarcadero we prepared a topical webinar and compared Windows native apps developed using Delphi and JavaScript/Electron/Node.js applications. What other tools or developing native Windows applications do you know? – We have C++ Builder (again, a part of RAD Studio) and C++ for Ms Visual Studio. But have you ever tried to develop rich UI applications using C++ for Visual Studio?
Object Pascal is a modern programming language
It is being changed all the time. A lot of new improvements have been introduced since Delphi 7. You can check out the webinar prepared by Marco Cantu “The Delphi Language Evolution”. Just follow the link: https://youtu.be/wNNoi_kfHko
Huge universe of third-party components
It can offer a huge universe of 3rd-party components for rich UI desktop applications, integrations, DB data access, etc. Free and paid. All these can really save your development time.
Single code base for native cross-platform apps
It has a single code-base for native cross-platform applications (if you use Firemonkey (FMX) framework instead of VCL). You can develop desktop applications for Windows, macOS, Linux. But how is it possible to make a cross-platform app native? – Delphi compiles your Object Pascal project using the platform native compilers for native execution on each platform.
Summary
Of course, we are not short-sighted and we clearly understand that Delphi, as well as any other development tool has its own pros and cons, risks and limitations. And we always perform deep business analysis in order to find out what tools would be the most efficient for new products or what way of dealing with a legacy system would be the best one in each situation: either we should migrate it to an up-to-date version or to another technology.
Keep in mind that Delphi is an independent development tool. It doesn’t have any relation to any operating system developer or owner, like Visual Studio belongs to Microsoft, XCode – to Apple, Android Studio – to Google. Delphi provides its own philosophy and development process flow, which makes it different from other tools. It is clear that Delphi has its advantages and disadvantages but one thing is obvious: it was really revolutionary 20 years ago, it is still modern nowadays and it will stay relevant in the future.
