delphi was originally developed by borland as a rapid application development tool for windows as the successor of turbo pascal. delphi added full object-oriented programming to the existing language, and since then the language has grown to support generics and anonymous methods, and native component object model (com) support. in 2006, borland’s developer tools section was transferred from borland to a wholly owned subsidiary known as codegear, which was sold to embarcadero technologies in 2008. in 2015, embarcadero was purchased by idera software, but the embarcadero mark was retained for the developer tools division.