Type-safe C-killer Delphi hits 30, but a replacement has risen

The FOSS world has replicated most of it in Lazarus

Delphi is still very much with us, but the FOSS world also has its own, largely compatible, GUI-based Object Pascal environment – and it's worth a look.

Valentine's Day 2025 marked the 30th anniversary of the release of Borland's Delphi, which fused Borland's version of Object Pascal, along with a GUI designer and database access, into a powerful whole. Appearing so early in 1995 meant that Delphi itself predated Windows 95 by just over six months: it started out as a 16-bit tool for Windows 3.1. (32-bit Windows was already a thing – the second release of Windows NT, version 3.5, appeared in late 1994, but it was still a bit niche.) The codename, which after much internal debate became the product name, reflected that it was intended as a local rapid-application-delevelopment tool that helped you to talk to Oracle.

Long-time Borland staffer David Intersimone – with whom The Register talked back in 2008 – has a splendidly in-depth write-up for the anniversary. He includes detailed instructions for how to get it running under DOSbox on a modern computer, complete with links for where to get the installation disk images for Delphi 1.0 and for Windows 3.1 too.

Nowadays, Delphi is maintained and sold by Embarcadero, and the company's Marco Cantu also has a rather shorter birthday message – which also links back to those for 11 of its previous birthdays, too.

The Reg joined in when Delphi turned 25, setting it in its historical context. One detail from back then does merit clarification, though: "Object Pascal was Borland's own language." Well, it was – Delphi's compiler was inherited from Borland's Turbo Pascal. As The Reg noted when Turbo Pascal turned 40, TP went OOPS with version 5.5, back in 1989. Borland didn't invent Object Pascal, though.

An Apple report [PDF] from almost exactly a decade before the release of Delphi, by the late great Larry Tesler, explains:

Object Pascal is a revision of Lisa Clascal designed by Apple Computer's Macintosh Software Group with the help of Niklaus Wirth.

Clascal was an older language designed for software development on Apple's first GUI computer, the Lisa. Its reference manual [PDF] from 1983 dates it as older than the Macintosh itself. In 1986, BYTE Magazine explained:

The syntax for Object Pascal was jointly designed by Apple's Clascal team and Niklaus Wirth. the designer of Pascal, who was invited to Apple's Cupertino headquarters specifically for this project. In addition to implementing Object Pascal on the Mac, Apple has put the Object Pascal specification in the public domain and encouraged others to implement compilers and interpreters for it.

Even if Delphi's 30 years puts fancy type-safe newbie Rust's mere 13 years into perspective, Object Pascal itself can thus legitimately claim 40 years. And just as Byte said, there are other implementations out there.

The FreePascal Compiler is one of the leading ones, and as The Reg noted back in 2020, it is still in active development with regular new releases. What that story didn't mention, though, is that there's much more to FreePascal than the bare compiler FPC. Alongside FPC itself, the FreePascal project has a remarkably complete graphical development environment, which has its own separate internet presence. It's called the Lazarus IDE.

Its screenshot gallery will give you a flavor of it, but what's notable is that it runs natively on a wide range of OSes, including Windows, Linux and FreeBSD via Gtk or Qt, and macOS. It's quite mature and complete in its own right. It's not identical to Delphi, but it's closely comparable and has a Delphi importer. As the about page says:

Can I use my existing Delphi code?

Some of it yes. If the code is standard Delphi pascal and it uses the standard components found in Delphi then the answer is yes.

This vulture is not a Pascal developer by any means, but has dabbled in the past, and we were delighted to find that we could knock up, compile and run a simple Pascal Hello World type program in under a minute. Back in the mists of time, the equivalent in Delphi 1.0 generated more than twice as many errors as there were lines of code.

FPC and Lazarus are impressively complete, run on most things and can build code for even more platforms than that. As they were 30 years ago, many people find them simpler, easier and more productive than trendier languages. If you want Delphi itself, there is a free community edition of Delphi 12, although there are limitations on what you can do with it – notably, if you make more than $5,000 a year selling apps you made with it, you'll have to pay. But there are no such strings attached with Lazarus. ®