RAD Studio 11 Alexandria
Delphi is nowadays mostly dead and used to maintain legacy software. It&#x27;s a terrible shame.<p>To understand why, we need to remember what Delphi was at the time it was made. It directly competed with VB6, an interpreted crap that needed dozens of files in a time when disks were slow. Delphi, on the other hand, compiled large products (we had dozens of modules) in 2 seconds, producing optimized native single file executable. On large forms you could see VB6 controls being painted one by one. Huge Delphi forms were shown instantly.<p>The development experience was stellar (I guess it still is). I worked for a guy who made DOS software and wanted to move into Windows space (20 years ago). Two of us made a full-blown ERP with over 800 forms and 600 database tables in a year and a half. It was at a time when companies didn&#x27;t have full-time Internet connections, so we synced the database between customers&#x27; branches over ISDN connections using our custom algorithm. This software is still in wide use today and my code is still in there.<p>My side project was made in Delphi and quickly surpassed my full-time salary, so I formed my own company. The only reason I moved away from Delphi years later was that the database drivers were far less available than in .NET ecosystem (and I make database migration software and need many drivers)
Moving to .NET was a pain, but it was obvious that without Anders Hejlsberg Delphi is going to wither down, and .NET is going to thrive and evolve.<p>Delphi today is a cash cow for enterprise software. Looking at this release, first thing mention is HiDPI support. In 2021.<p>But I do miss the incredible productivity I had while working in Delphi. A friend once passed by and saw me working. He said &quot;screens are changing so quickly I can&#x27;t even track what you are doing&quot;. We need that development experience again.<p>Edit: formatting.