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Take a look at Lazarus. It's not meant to be 100% compatible with Delphi, but I imagine it would be much faster to port to that than to rewrite it in C.

You can try Lazarus and Free Pascal. They are not anywhere near Delphi in terms of maturity but it can give good results in many situations. Its IDE is also quite user friendly.

http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/

I'm nostalgic too. Delphi still is one of the best development systems for Windows out there. Too bad Borland/Inprise/Borland jumped on the .NET bandwagon and destroyed it. But if you get an old copy of D6 (or D7? cannot remember which one was the last non .NET-polluted version) you can write great software with it.

Also, take a look at Lazarus. It's a multiplatform and open source Delphi clone that brought the beauty of Delphi to Linux.
Note that it's 100% native on all platforms and produces 100% native code: no Wine, no emulations. Young but already powerful, and damn funny to use!

The Free Pascal Compiler is indeed only about the non-GUI stuff. All the GUI stuff (including the forms unit) is handled by the Lazarus team.

Apparently, you've never heard of the Free Pascal Compiler or the accompanying RAD IDE Lazarus.

Apparently, you've never heard of the Free Pascal Compiler or the accompanying RAD IDE Lazarus.

We already have a good visual native programming environment under Linux, it's called Lazarus and it's perfectly integrated into Free Pascal. Please give it a try: its stability and features improved dramatically during last year.
Before someone complains it's Pascal and not C, keep in mind that modern Pascal implementations allow the same level of shooting yourself in the foot of traditional C, ie lists of pointers to structures of arrays of pointers to functions returning... etc. Add threads, memory management, sockets, inline assembly and you get the point.

If you ever struggled with Glade or Kdesigner you'll find a much cleaner and productive environment in Lazarus.

Gnome is a pile of crap because its libraries and interface tools are pieces of crap, and most unix programmers just refuse to know how things are done elsewhere. C'mon guys, in 2007 you really still have to fight a minute with both mouse and keyboard to link a mouse click on a button to a function while it was done in less than 1/10 of a second 10 years ago? Is really Glade (whatever version) the best tool for that job, or you agree that Linux is in serious need of some heavy development in the RAD applications?
If that's the case, then take a look at the little gem called Lazarus..
Ladies and gentlemen, this is visual programming done right: a complete clone of Delphi (the most clean and well thought RAD out here) which produces fast+compact+native code and is damn easy and intuitive to learn.
Note: this is not that Kylix crap produced by Borland years ago which ran under Wine and sucked tons of resources; Lazarus is a 100% multiplatform native software which compiles 100% native software, and is damn fast! No Java crap involved.
Remember: It's the concept, not the features. Even Kdevelop and QTDesigner, though they're literally stuffed with features still not implemented in Lazarus, can't compete with it when it comes to productivity. Give Lazarus a try, you won't regret.

Lazarus is the new Kylix!

Why even use Delphi any more? All Lazarus needs is proper documentation and some tutorials to be written, and then everyone who used Kylix can port to Lazarus and avoid Delphi.

I'm surprised nobody has bothered to use wxWidgets to clone Delphi.

I also saw Delphi going off course. I'm still using Delphi 5. It does what I want and Later versions only seemed to add things I don't really care about.

As for making Delphi open source...

http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/

give it a go.

I wrote some software in Delphi and was excited when Borland (Inprise) announced Kylix. In the end I purchased all the versions of Kylix that they released and none were up to production quality standards. They all had longstanding, known bugs that were never addressed. Eventually, I found the Lazarus project ( http://lazarus.freepascal.org/ ). While the debugging is not up to what I had with delphi, I am able to code in Linux on a project that other developers are developing in Windows. While we have found bugs and limitations, the developers are quick to fix problems that we find and/or suggest better ways to do things. Matt Henley

With today's freely available (OSS) Free Pascal compiler it would be easy to get started using Pascal. This compiler not only understands the Borland flavour of Pascal, but it also has flags to compile other modes of Pascal, even Mac.

But I digress. Instead of teaching the language, teach the concepts, yes. I agree with that. I'm still teaching myself some basic things as a hobbyist, and this language/compiler have helped me come to understand some comp sci concepts, such as: linked lists, pointer management, etc {yes, pascal has pointers, sigh. yes they can be just as powerful}).

I offer this as an option instead of C. Use C if you want. Use pascal if you want to use something that was designed to HELP teach students, intitially. It's way more powerful than a toy however, Pascal has grown up, it never stopped growing, and now we have a free implementation that works on several platforms.

Guess I'll get modded down with you.

For the language itself, the documentation pages of Free Pascal have lots of information:
http://www.freepascal.org/docs.html

Of course, those don't cover the Lazarus IDE and the LCL (Lazarus Component Library), the Lazarus counterpart to Delphi's VCL.
I guess you'd best start at http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Documen tation. Unfortunately, it is currently limited to a bunch of examples. An online reference on the individual components has been started but is not very useful yet. That is something I'm missing myself, the (exellent) Deplhi online help has spoiled me there ;-)

For the language itself, the documentation pages of Free Pascal have lots of information:
http://www.freepascal.org/docs.html

Of course, those don't cover the Lazarus IDE and the LCL (Lazarus Component Library), the Lazarus counterpart to Delphi's VCL.
I guess you'd best start at http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Documen tation. Unfortunately, it is currently limited to a bunch of examples. An online reference on the individual components has been started but is not very useful yet. That is something I'm missing myself, the (exellent) Deplhi online help has spoiled me there ;-)

At the risk of looking like a sociopath, I think that Visual BASIC sucks too ;-)

For quick development of GUI applications (on Windows), Borland Delphi is nice. Similar target audience, clearer structure of the language. Delphi uses a Pascal dialect with object oriented extensions. I'm using it in my job and cannot complain.

The Linux branch of Delphi, Kylix, unfortunately seems defunct, but there is an Open Source project that works on a Delphi replacement:
Lazarus (http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/). Available on both Windows and Linux.

So if you need a nice development tool for GUI stuff, I think Lazarus would be worth checking out.

It sounds like you're looking for something that you can just draw the screen the way you want it to look with all of the controls and such. It sounds a lot like the Visual Basic interface (or any of the visual programming tools). Obviously buying Visual Basic to do layouts is silly but there are other freeware programming tools that work the same way. A quick search came up with Lazarus.

One great gui I would recommend is Lazarus.
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/

This is a Delphi clone based on Free Pascal.

The source code virtually compiles on any platform available.
Most Delphi code can be reused. The quality is really good.

RTH

the Delphi grammer is supposedly proprietary and a trade secret, and that no one else can build a parser that handles all of the corner cases

Of course it's possible to build a parser which handles all corner cases, be it not in one shot since there is indeed no design document to base yourself on. But by now at least we (the Free Pascal Compiler) do support most of it.

I am kinda switching over to Java Swing for the GUI, C++ through the JNI for the hardcore numeric stuff -- a person sees the handwriting on the wall about Borland longevity. I kinda want to get off Windows by the time Vista, Aero, and whatever Windows-specific GUI gobbeldygook takes hold, and Java looks attractive to me. It is easy to get spoiled by GC and some other Java hacks, but I miss the fast compiles -- javac is dog slow.

You might want to have a look at Lazarus. Although the underlying Free Pascal Compiler is not as fast as Delphi, it's a lot faster than most other compilers (and javac). Have a look here for a small unscientific test. Can't compare to Delphi, because the compiler itself is not written in a Delphi-compilable way.

For Java, try using IBM's jikes compiler instead (not to be confused with the JikesRVM -- jikes is simply a Java compiler, not a whole virtual machine).

Eclipse, on the other hand, is still something I am struggling with -- it is IBMish in its weirdness about a whole bunch of stuff -- how do you just take a bunch of .java files in a directory and call it a project? It doesn't like a directory that is already there, and it wants to create some other directory in some standard location instead of where you want it. Still working on that one. So even Java needs "make files" of some kind of external metadata to organize multi-file source codes. Object Pascal famously has all of the dependencies specified in source code as a feature of the language.

Java does specify the dependencies in the source as part of the language. You have to "import" all packages you need, much like a uses clause (and it allows for both more fine-grained and coarse-grained control regarding what you want to import).

The only difference is indeed, as you mentioned, that packages should recide in a directory called the same (or in a jar file). This organisation however avoids problems you can have in Pascal if you e.g. have multiple units with the same name in different directories. It does not necessitate the use of "makefiles of some kind of external metadata" in any way though (unless you consider directories falling under that).

If there are two features, no, make that three features! that make Delphi problematic for the future, they are 1) Delphi has some real solid Windows lock-in, especially since Kylix didn't go anywhere -- the Delphi extension to Pascal are quite Windows-specific even if you are not doing GUI programming,

Most Delphi extensions can be perfectly ported to other platforms. FPC runs on Dos, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, Gameboy Advance, ... and the supported basic features are the same everywhere (except for threading, which is not supported on Dos and some other lightweight platforms).

2) while Delphi is great and everything, it is behind the times with collection classes and other library richness of everything from Java to Python -- what collection classes are there are also tied into the VCL and bloat non-GUI or GUI-non-VCL programs,

I do agree with you here (in spite of the fact that there are some third party container collections for Delphi).

the Delphi grammer is supposedly proprietary and a trade secret, and that no one else can build a parser that handles all of the corner cases

Of course it's possible to build a parser which handles all corner cases, be it not in one shot since there is indeed no design document to base yourself on. But by now at least we (the Free Pascal Compiler) do support most of it.

I am kinda switching over to Java Swing for the GUI, C++ through the JNI for the hardcore numeric stuff -- a person sees the handwriting on the wall about Borland longevity. I kinda want to get off Windows by the time Vista, Aero, and whatever Windows-specific GUI gobbeldygook takes hold, and Java looks attractive to me. It is easy to get spoiled by GC and some other Java hacks, but I miss the fast compiles -- javac is dog slow.

You might want to have a look at Lazarus. Although the underlying Free Pascal Compiler is not as fast as Delphi, it's a lot faster than most other compilers (and javac). Have a look here for a small unscientific test. Can't compare to Delphi, because the compiler itself is not written in a Delphi-compilable way.

For Java, try using IBM's jikes compiler instead (not to be confused with the JikesRVM -- jikes is simply a Java compiler, not a whole virtual machine).

Eclipse, on the other hand, is still something I am struggling with -- it is IBMish in its weirdness about a whole bunch of stuff -- how do you just take a bunch of .java files in a directory and call it a project? It doesn't like a directory that is already there, and it wants to create some other directory in some standard location instead of where you want it. Still working on that one. So even Java needs "make files" of some kind of external metadata to organize multi-file source codes. Object Pascal famously has all of the dependencies specified in source code as a feature of the language.

Java does specify the dependencies in the source as part of the language. You have to "import" all packages you need, much like a uses clause (and it allows for both more fine-grained and coarse-grained control regarding what you want to import).

The only difference is indeed, as you mentioned, that packages should recide in a directory called the same (or in a jar file). This organisation however avoids problems you can have in Pascal if you e.g. have multiple units with the same name in different directories. It does not necessitate the use of "makefiles of some kind of external metadata" in any way though (unless you consider directories falling under that).

If there are two features, no, make that three features! that make Delphi problematic for the future, they are 1) Delphi has some real solid Windows lock-in, especially since Kylix didn't go anywhere -- the Delphi extension to Pascal are quite Windows-specific even if you are not doing GUI programming,

Most Delphi extensions can be perfectly ported to other platforms. FPC runs on Dos, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, Gameboy Advance, ... and the supported basic features are the same everywhere (except for threading, which is not supported on Dos and some other lightweight platforms).

2) while Delphi is great and everything, it is behind the times with collection classes and other library richness of everything from Java to Python -- what collection classes are there are also tied into the VCL and bloat non-GUI or GUI-non-VCL programs,

I do agree with you here (in spite of the fact that there are some third party container collections for Delphi).

Pascal is a very well-designed language that features some really fast compilers. It may not be ideal for lower-level coding (the kind of thing you would use C for), but as a workhorse to solve numeric problems or for useful applications, it is really quite good. Some of the newer compilers also generate very efficient code. You can say what you want about Wirth languages, but the man knew something about them.

Anyway -- I never really understood why people were so down on Pascal. It's legible (if a bit verbose) and has nice support for modules and the like. Perhaps you have no motivation to move away from the language you are currently using, but people using Pascal (or Delphi) may have no motivation to move away from them either.

I can build my LibTomMath project [~9K lines of source] in 2.3 seconds on my 2P Opteron 285 setup. :-)

I can compile and link the Free Pascal Compiler (158612 lines of code including comments) using itself in 15.9 seconds on my G5/1.8GHz (using one cpu). That's 9975 loc/s, compared to your 3913 (and you were possibly even using two cpus?).

And guess what: people still sometimes complain about how "slow" our compiler is compared to Delphi. So don't underestimate Delphi's compilation speed...

It still is :) And there's a Free alternative to Kylix as well: Lazarus + Free Pascal. The main reason Kylix was not well-received was because it's extremely buggy and slow (the IDE was Wine-based), and it runs on just a few distributions.

so object pascal currently only runs on windows.

so object pascal currently only runs on windows.

I agree with petermgreen.
Take a look at FreePascal http://www.freepascal.org/. It is multiplatform, and you can write console apps, GUI apps, daemons, drivers, CGI apps for the web, etc... Even an OS is based on freepascal.

In the open-source community! The Free Pascal Compiler is a working command line compiler for the Delphi language, Object Pascal, and a graphical IDE called Lazarus is available to step in for Delphi itself.

Beholdeth the Open Source Power, that it doth keep languages from the grave!

In the open-source community! The Free Pascal Compiler is a working command line compiler for the Delphi language, Object Pascal, and a graphical IDE called Lazarus is available to step in for Delphi itself.

Beholdeth the Open Source Power, that it doth keep languages from the grave!

Object Pascal is a good language for beginners. It has strong typing and object-oriented features, but the typing isn't strict to the point of being obnoxious like in Java. It is lower level, so you will deal some with pointers and memory management but it is harder to make a mess with than C/C++. You can also visually design the UI of your application, but the language isn't a disaster like VB (and doesn't run in a VM like C# or Java, so it's quick).

Object Pascal is a good language for beginners. It has strong typing and object-oriented features, but the typing isn't strict to the point of being obnoxious like in Java. It is lower level, so you will deal some with pointers and memory management but it is harder to make a mess with than C/C++. You can also visually design the UI of your application, but the language isn't a disaster like VB (and doesn't run in a VM like C# or Java, so it's quick).

FreePascal is exactly that and some more

Let me go ahead and plug a couple projects for the disillusioned masses reading this:
Free Delphi Alternative:
Lazarus
Free C++ IDEs:
Anjuta, Code::Blocks, KDevelop (works with other langs too I believe)
Free Python IDE:
Stani's Python Editor
Free Visual Basic Alternative:
Gambas
Free Java (and others) IDE:
Eclipse

Problem is though that Delphi is getting more and more expensive (Eur 1000 for the minimal versions, and 500 per upgrade that often doesn't add that much for win32).

Also see Lazarus as crossplatform OSS equivalent http://lazarus.freepascal.org/

The best win32 tool: Delphi

Good OSS alternative: http://lazarus.freepascal.org/

Try Lazarus, http://lazarus.freepascal.org/

> Delphi is Windows only and owned by a company with a very questionable future (forget about Kylix). C# is > basically Windows only as well.

The Borland implementation of Delphi is, but others aren't:

http://lazarus.freepascal.org/

Pascal: The Compiler Won't Let You Shoot Yourself in the Foot

And that is why I use FPC.

it's REALLY simple.. from there we moved onto C++.

not flaming, note author's question regarding to FIRST language...
here's some I DON'T recommend: Java, Prolog, or Scheme

have a look at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/

Yes, but you can add lazarus to freepascal and get something similar to delphi.

I think their .NET angle is interesting:

http://www.freepascal.org/faq.html#dotnet

Not trolling. Honest question.

On the FreePascal advantages page it says it DOESN'T use makefiles (second bullet point).

But on the tools page it says it comes with a tool called fpcmake, a "tool that allows you to make complex makefiles to compile programs and units with FPC. The Free Pascal team uses it to create all it's makefiles."

So which is it? I'm confused...

Not trolling. Honest question.

On the FreePascal advantages page it says it DOESN'T use makefiles (second bullet point).

But on the tools page it says it comes with a tool called fpcmake, a "tool that allows you to make complex makefiles to compile programs and units with FPC. The Free Pascal team uses it to create all it's makefiles."

So which is it? I'm confused...

http://www.freepascal.org/faq.html#FPandGNUPascal

It's still pre-release and there are things you can do about it.

What about Lazarus?

The Lazarus project.

http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/

This reminds me, I haven't looked at this for a loooong time.

> I agree that [...] Open Source Developers should take a lot of [Visual Basic] strengths and make their own RAD language.

What about this one? Or that other one?

check out Lazarus. It's a bit bare bones compared to Delphi, but still good enough for simple projects.

http://www.freepascal.org/

"The language syntax is semantically compatible with TP 7.0 as well as most versions of Delphi (classes, rtti, exceptions, ansistrings, widestrings, interfaces). Furthermore Free Pascal supports function overloading, operator overloading, global properties and other such features."

There is an associated project that aims to duplicate the VCL called FCL:

http://www.freepascal.org/fcl/fcl.html

Finally, there is the related Delphi-like IDE to go with it:

http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/

It's actually quite good.