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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

I'd write it in Lazarus/Free Pascal, compile it to WASM[1], and do whatever hacks I had to do in order to push it through the internet into a web browser.

There's nothing even close to the productivity we had back in the days of VB6/Delphi to be had on the web, ever. The closest we're going to get is a pale imitation.

[1] https://wiki.freepascal.org/WebAssembly

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If that was really true, it would be a competitive advantage of many companies. Unless they are hiding it. Desktop apps are easier to develop as there are way less moving parts.

There isn't nothing magical about VB6/Delphi, just a lot of work put there. Many JS developers are multiple times more productive than what was possible to accomplish with VB6/Delphi.

I remember writing a cgi app in delphi back in the late 90s to emulate our in house excel sheet that priced up a custom computer.

Do you have any suggested reading for what you're suggesting because I'm just about to start a project and as we do a lot of our LOB apps in Delphi this seems useful?

No, I don't have any suggested reading... just a plan of action should it be required. I'm assuming that enough work has been done that it should be possible to build a CRUD application in Pascal, and have it eventually produce working WASM executable code.

I have some existing code in pascal[1]... and it would be helpful for it to run in the browser.... lemme see how bad it is making this happen. It'll take a few days, I think.

[1] https://github.com/mikewarot/Bitgrid

Turns out I was able to get something to work in about 2 hours... just after the HN edit window closed. Here's a really small Hello World in Pascal --> WASM --> Web Page you can see the output from, all in a GitHub repo.[1]

[1] https://github.com/mikewarot/fpc_wasm

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