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Comment by gerardatkonvo | Hacker News Reader

As much as I love Object Pascal (it was my first programing language) it has no reason to exist in 2025 other than legacy applications and small RAD windows programs.

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Lazarus (kinda of a Delphi clone that also uses Object Pascal) is probably the best way to make cross platform native desktop applications that actually uses the native GUI toolkit for each platform.

I hear it is quite popular for creating GUIs wrappers for CLI tools.

Yes! The combination of fpc, LCL, and Lazarus running on Windows/macOS/Linux is a powerful combination.

If only mobile was possible too

I never tried but on their website they show screenshots of lazarus apps running in android/ios.

HeidiSQL is written with Lazarus/FPC.

Yup. If you write your tool as mostly library with the main function just calling into your .so/.dll then the work to make a gui version of your program is minimal.

See this example: https://github.com/lelanthran/frame/blob/master/frame-browse...

Ironically Delphi and C++ Builder are in a much better shape than Microsoft stacks in what concerns Windows applications.

They are the main product, not something that is seen as cost center nowadays.

Also they cross compile to all major desktop and mobile OSes.

Strong opinion, but no evidence provided.

What kind of evidence do you want? I wrote Delphi for years and I'm now a Typescript developer. Is there any current major software written in Delphi?

The most important ones I found are the windows MySQL GUI, Cheat Engine and Total Commander. I genuinely was searching for more than 10 minutes and everything else is either abandonware or has been rewritten to a different language.

What important software is written in TS outside the SaaS crapware and libraries that enable it?

Inno Setup

https://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php

FL Studio

https://www.embarcadero.com/case-study/image-line-software-c...

> Is there any current major software written in Delphi?

That is not evidence for "no reason to exist".

The major reason for Delphi and/or Lazarus and/or Qt and/or similar WYSIWYG tool to exist is "when you want to produce a cross platform GUI application using a drag-and-drop form builder."

The fact that I can write a chat application that uses 30MB of RAM at runtime instead of 800MB like electron does is just icing on the cake.

> and small RAD windows programs.

You can also use Delphi to produce Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux apps. All from single code base.

FreePascal, that I believe is supposed to be reasonably Delphi compatible, supports "Intel x86 (16 and 32 bit), AMD64/x86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, SPARC, SPARC64, ARM, AArch64, MIPS, Motorola 68k, AVR, and the JVM. Supported operating systems include Windows (16/32/64 bit, CE, and native NT), Linux, Mac OS X/iOS/iPhoneSimulator/Darwin, FreeBSD and other BSD flavors, DOS (16 bit, or 32 bit DPMI), OS/2, AIX, Android, Haiku, Nintendo GBA/DS/Wii, AmigaOS, MorphOS, AROS, Atari TOS, and various embedded platforms. Additionally, support for RISC-V (32/64), Xtensa, and Z80 architectures, and for the LLVM compiler infrastructure is available in the development version. Additionally, the Free Pascal team maintains a transpiler for pascal to Javascript called pas2js."

https://www.freepascal.org/

You do not get that much portability with many other languages. C, perhaps. But FreePascal has a bigger standard library and many other libraries that support many platforms. It is also a much safer language with checked array bounds and while there is support for low level unsafe things you do not have to use those nearly as often as in C. And while the compiler might not be as fast as Turbo Pascal (or Delphi?) it is still amazingly fast compared to any other compiler I have used this century.

What's not to like? Guess the lack of attention from developers and potential risk of there not being enough around to maintain it? I honestly do not know, but you do not hear much about it and not many projects seem to use it.

I’ve tried Lazarus a few times (on macOS), but I’ve found Delphi to be significantly more polished and reliable (including the more complex workflow of developing on Windows and running the resulting binary on macOS or in the iOS simulator — it just works).

I did consider becoming a contributor to make Lazarus better, so maybe something I should revisit.

The first thing I’d do is make sure Lazarus works perfectly on Windows, macOS, and Linux. For the other platforms, fpc excellence is fine, but they’re not important enough, I think, for Lazarus. One counter argument might be certain embedded applications but I suspect that would not be the right prioritization…

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