Lazarus does not support BPL. Android and iOS support are under question. Free Pascal devs for many years did not look into Ada, and looked into C++ more, and that made Free Pascal ugly. 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. Anything is better than C++. Delphi delivered controlled types, that was IIRC for many years in top 10 feature requests on Quality Central, until QC was purged. They call it "managed records".
Delphi has got inline const syntax. They talk about inline var, but from my Ada programming experience inline const is the real game changer. When there was only local variable block, some stuff was assigned inside loop. This stuff was assigned once per iteration, but since variable is declared outside the loop, it is considered variable. Now, when inside loop, it can be assigned once and made read-only. I have some doubts that Free Pascal is up-to-date with these changes.
Hi-DPI. Did not test, but questionable that Free Pascal got it right.
I'm not sure how you find Free Pascal "ugly" while Delphi not so considering that they're 99% the same language (up that to 99.9% when you compile Pascal code in "Delphi mode") :-P.
> Hi-DPI. Did not test, but questionable that Free Pascal got it right.
Free Pascal is the compiler and has nothing to do with Hi-DPI. Lazarus is what you probably have in mind and does Hi-DPI (in fact it can do Hi-DPI even with widgetsets like Gtk2 that themselves do not have support for it).
The IDE experience, they are the ones driving the language evolution, FreePascal follows, and the industry that cares about Object Pascal, usually only cares because of Delphi.
Don't get me wrong, FreePascal is great, but it hardly has a presence at big corporations.
If they no longer use Delphi, means they have long moved into either Java or .NET.
> they are the ones driving the language evolution, FreePascal follows
That is not the case, Free Pascal has improved the language before Delphi and Delphi followed, e.g. FPC added generics before Delphi and more recently it implemented management operators before Delphi.
One big annoyance though is that when Delphi does decide to implement some language feature introduced by Free Pascal they implement it using an incompatible syntax which is petty (at best). FPC then has to support both their own syntax (usually in OBJFPC mode) and Delphi's syntax (usually in DELPHI mode) to let people share code between FPC and Delphi.
I used briefly some 8 years ago, it is very good for getting full-native (including native UI toolkit) cross-platform desktop apps. It can build self contained binaries that just work.
My use-case was building a simple USB-stick-portable application for windows and it was great for that.
Over the past year, I've replaced quite a few of my Tcl/Tk GUI apps with versions built in Lazarus. Lazarus 3.x was a bit quirky for my tastes, but 4.x has been very good.
It's not quite the Delphi experience, but it's close enough that I could see myself using Lazarus for day-to-day development and being fairly productive with it.
It improved a lot and it is good. On Linux I think the default way to go is still Lazarus. But with Delphi you can buy more shiny polished things on top. So for commercial use Delphi is more relevant. And there are enough differences in compatibility, so you most likely don't want to deal with both at the same time.
But the LLMs are also not one-shotting it, or are they? I assume they have some ways to verify it, e.g. to visualize it (convert to PNG, then feed as vision tokens back to the LLM), or other ways, maybe also pure text LLMs have some ways to verify the result at least somewhat? And with such feedback loop they can iterate.
call me an optimist, but I believe that more and more things are getting more viable to do from the terminal. tools like jj remove the need in Git GUI because mental model and UX gets streamlined, and the AI craze incentivizes practically every company to create their own CLI
