For quite a while now, I’ve been noticing that a lot of interesting apps on Windows are written in Borland Delphi. For example, Skype and Copernic are written in Delphi.
I looked at the package a while ago, and I was impressed. The language has some form of garbage collection and a healthy add-in market (VCL extensions). These extensions are a lot better than your typical Active-X or C++ libs that are out there. Delphi also interfaces with Microsoft COM really well. In fact it can even become a COM add-in for other apps. The super nice feature is that it deploys as a single .exe file. This means you don’t need to ship your app with a bunch of runtime DLL’s like other systems do (Visual Basic, .Net or even C++). Also, their runtime requires no per-user licensing.
Still, I won’t use the system because of the language syntax. If they had a different syntax, then I would happily use their system (a javascript, java, algol like syntax). “Yet another syntax” is a big hurdle for me, especially when their syntax is old and dying out.
Suppossedly, they have a new syntax based on C#, but I think that it requires the .Net runtime. This undermines all of the good stuff that the previous version had (lack of target machine runtime requirements.)
I’ll try to contact them to see what their thoughts are on this…