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Comment by sizzzzlerz | Hacker News Reader

Is Pascal used much these days. I learned it way back in the 80s since several of my MSEE classes used it. Professionally, I never used nor heard of it being used except for Apple. I'm sure it has evolved since the dark ages to incorprorate more modern programming techniques but with the wide range of languages available today and the fact that it is rarely taught anymore, why might some decide to use it on their project?

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I think Pascal, as in it's modern dialect Object Pascal used in Delphi and FPC/Lazarus is a sort of "hidden language". You won't see many big Open Source projects using it and there's only a handful of big commercial packages using it, but behind the scenes for domain-specific/in-house software it is used quite a bit. It allows small teams or individuals to very quickly put together software that is used by the business departments or engineering/technical with modern GUIs and good performance. It's exactly what it says on the package, "Rapid Application Development". Stuff like Rust and Go are great, but having to code out the entire UI by hand basically doubles the maintenance/development burden and requires a lot of knowledge about the widgetsets and their libs. QT Creator, Glade/Cambalanche, wxFormBuilder are nice, but there's a decoupling there that adds complexity and they all require C/C++ if you want native code. WinForms/WPF on .NET in Visual Studio probably come the closest to what you get, but it's mostly Windows specific and I wasn't able to pick it up easy like I was Delphi.

FPC and Lazarus are really amazing tools. FPC itself is quite a competent compiler with many available platforms including legacy platforms, Java VM, WASM. Very fast compilation, run time perf is not quite C++ especially with strings, but fast enough. Even Lazarus LCL programs are quite lean and efficient for what they are. The RTL/FCL are comprehensive with tons of functionality, things like string handling, containers, math, all there and everything you expect.

The killer app with Lazarus is it's cross platform GUI capabilities. The last release is still stuck on Gtk2, but trunk Gtk3 is default on Linux with QT5 and QT6 available, Cocoa, and Win32 and for the most part it just works. You build for GTK or Qt, you switch to Win32 and compile a native windows app. The RTL abstracts most of the OS stuff like file handling and threads, and the LCL handles the widgetsets. There's nothing else even close when it comes to cross platform development of desktop apps.

Check out:

- Delphi (https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/features/delphi)

- Lazarus & Free Pascal (https://www.lazarus-ide.org)

- Oxygene (https://www.remobjects.com/elements/oxygene/)

And since you remarked about "modern languages", have a look at https://castle-engine.io/modern_pascal

The truth is we need more expository articles like this.

Silver Pascal coder is doing a lot of Pascal evangelism, but he is alone.

Enough to keep a conference going in Germany for years.

https://entwickler-konferenz.de/program-eng

I'm speaking there this year! Come join. One talk is on a 'Vision for Pascal', some ideas for where Pascal could or should go.

I expect among many other things I will be mentioning FPC's support for packages and this thread :)

It still has a loyal fan base. :) And it evolved from the old Pascal of the 80s into Object Pascal, with extensions developed for Delphi, that eventually made their way back into the Free Pascal Compiler (fpc). Also people are developing even more modern language extensions and syntax for it (1), but let's see whether that catches on.

We're developing our game in Pascal, too, as our main coder is quite prolific in it. See this (2) discussion on HN about our game from about two weeks ago:

1. https://unleashedpascal.org/ 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49931993

The FLStudio DAW suite is written in Delphi.

I've shipped a few things to clients with it in the past 5 years.

Yeah, it’s just called golang

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