| ▲ | baranul 6 hours ago |
| It's amazing how underestimated the Object Pascal language is. Certain people or rivals want to write it off or declare it's "dead", yet the language (including various dialects) are still going strong. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Yeah, it was pity that Borland lost its way, and Apple decided to refocus from Object Pascal into C++. Otherwise it would still be a big contender. Everything that Zig offers over C as selling point was already there in Object Pascal. |
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| ▲ | sehugg 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I recall the turning point was when id used the Watcom compiler for DOOM. Watcom had the 32-bit flat model DOS extender and were starting to add the difficult optimizations. Turbo/Borland Pascal was built for compile and link speed, not even getting a real -O option until Delphi (except for turning off range and stack checking) | | | |
| ▲ | ape4 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If I remember right, it was memory safe - something C/C++ has yet to achieve. | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Even PL/I, JOVIAL, and NEWP on the decade predating C had it. |
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| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Comptime? Vastly superior toolchain? Trivial C interop? Sub-second incremental compilation in large projects? I'm not familiar with Object Pascal at all, so do correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd really be surprised if it has much of Zig's standout features. | | |
| ▲ | mickeyp 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Delphi would compile & link 2 MLOC of code on a crappy work laptop in 30 seconds to a minute. Incremental compiles were instant. So fast most developers never bothered learning the "go to next error" hotkey and just spammed F9 (compile & run) whenever they fixed a syntax error. It was that fast. Trivial C interop - yes. Both pascal and cdecl style calling conventions. Toolchain? Back then - yes. Today? Probably not; depends what you mean by it. It had perfect COM interop which mattered back then, and you could trivially link stuff if you wanted to. And people did. | | |
| ▲ | tliltocatl an hour ago | parent [-] | | Comptime here means not "compilation time", but rather ability to run some your code during compilation (i. e. compile-time metaprogramming). Pascal didn't had this. | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I'm sure they know that. I specifically mentioned actual compilation time as another one of the things that's great about Zig, so it is relevant to mention. Certainly the language sounds nice from what I'm hearing. These days most languages are deeply neglecting compilation time as a feature (interpreted languages aside), so Zig is a breath of fresh air for me in that regard. |
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| ▲ | lelanthran 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Comptime? Vastly superior toolchain? Trivial C interop? Sub-second incremental compilation in large projects? No comptime, but everything else, sure, Turbo Pascal (and then Delphi) had. Maybe it'll blow your mind (not sure if you find this impressive or not), but Turbo Pascal had sub-second compilation per module on large modules back on my 486 with 4MB of RAM. Sure, Zig has more features than Pascal, but not the ones you listed (except, of course, for comptime). | | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Comptime is the only thing going for it. Object Pascal compilers were already super fast in MS-DOS hardware! |
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| ▲ | LoganDark 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Apple decided to refocus from Object Pascal into C++ IIRC Apple went and made Objective-C(/C++) and then eventually Swift. Not sure if they actually embraced C++ all that much - did they really? | | |
| ▲ | pjmlp 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Completely off the charts. I am talking about Apple after Jobs was kicked out. You missed the part where NeXT licensed Objective-C from Stepstone, Apple bought NeXT as last survival action before bankruptcy, and OS X sprung out of NeXTSTEP. | | |
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| ▲ | maomao5 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| People hate the verbose syntax. It doesn't bother me, but I've been surprised how common that is described amongst people that don't care for Pascal. Personally, in that family of languages I prefer Ada, but I gave up with programming and programming languages. |
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| ▲ | Narishma 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | For me it's less the verbose syntax but more the weirdness and inconsistency of it. Like making a distinction between a procedure and a function, or returning data from a function by assigning it to a magical variable. It feels like a cobbled-together language rather than a properly designed one. |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| IMO it is not entirely dead, but not really "alive" either. TIOBE even has Object Pascal mentioned right now in TOP 20. Now, TIOBE has tons of issues, but it also means that there exists some tangible interest. Still, I don't feel many people want to use Object Pascal these days. If you have the choice between Python and Object Pascal, most people will undoubtedly use Python. It's just how it is right now, and I also don't see how that can change in favour of Object Pascal. Programming languages nowadays have so much more competition, and people are less tolerant of flaws. Strangely enough, people barely seem to work on these flaws; this is one of my pet peeve with ruby, the documentation should be much better but it is not. I no longer find that acceptable in 2026, with AI spam slop lowering the quality and google search being terrible and almost totally useless nowadays. You'd assume that a counter-move to this slop-degradation would be to massively improve documentation, but you still find core projects in ruby or at the least important add-ons, to have low-quality documentation. And barely anybody wants to improve on that either. |
