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Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers – Castle Game Engine

17 points birdculture 2 days ago 5 comments

jqpabc123 2 days ago | parent

I was introduced a very long time ago --- aka Delphi 2. I really like the language but there are mainly 2 problems that stand in the way of using it.

1) The code isn't as "optimized" as it could be.

2) The talent pool is limited --- chicken or egg issue.

It has been this way for a very long time so I don't see it changing.

mhitza 19 minutes ago | parent

As a different datapoint Pascal is still taught here in Romania in secondary school just as it was the case 20 years ago.

Bigger problem is that they teach the fundamentals with the abandonware that is turbo pascal instead of using something like the modern Free Pascal Compiler. Which means knowledge of what is possible outside curricula is limited.

Last year I almost was tasked with porting some Pascal codebase to a modern language. Problem was the project had a bus factor of 1, legacy overengineered and would only compile on windows with some proprietary compiler.

Maybe that company would use Claude/Codex or something like that, today, to port the project.

baranul 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

pjmlp 21 minutes ago | parent

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.

WillAdams 5 minutes ago | parent

I bought Delphi ages ago, but never got very far with it, which I regret.

I'd love to be able to take it up again, and this document looks very promising for that, esp. paired with:

https://wiki.freepascal.org/pas2js

which I now see is supported in Lazarus.

If someone has an example graphical project which compiles to an HTML page w/ JavaScript using the above, I'd love to see it and a detailed set of build instructions and notes on installing the needed toolchain and deployment. (as a note, I'm currently working in flet.dev using Python which allowed me to get a small prototype up-and-running, but I'm still looking into self-hosting and doing something more complex)