Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available

Embarcadero has released Delphi 13 Community Edition, updating its venerable development environment with new language features, a 64-bit IDE, and modern mobile platform support. This unexpected update for a historically significant tool sparked a wave of nostalgia on Hacker News, while also prompting robust debate about its current relevance, pricing model, and competitive landscape against free alternatives like Lazarus and .NET.

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The Lowdown

Embarcadero has announced the availability of Delphi 13 Community Edition, a free version of its professional Delphi development environment. This release is based on Delphi 13 Florence, bringing community users up to date with improvements from versions 12.2, 12.3, and 13.0, including enhanced mobile support.

Target Audience: Designed for students, hobbyists, independent developers, and eligible startups earning less than US$5,000 annually or with teams of up to five developers.
Language Enhancements: Introduces new language features such as a conditional expression (ternary operator), NameOf intrinsic, is not and not in operators, new compiler directives ($PUSHOPT, $POPOPT, noreturn), and improvements to generic type constraints and managed records.
IDE Improvements: Features a new 64-bit IDE (alongside the 32-bit one) for larger projects, a 64-bit Delphi language server, enhanced search and filtering, Focus Mode, editor scrollbar annotations, split editor views, the reintroduction of Classic Delphi CodeInsight, and GetIt package versioning.
FireMonkey Updates: Gains a Display Link service for smoother animations, GPU-accelerated bitmap copying, new TMaskEdit and TApplicationEvents components, alignment options, and extended scrolling, bounce, and touch interaction controls.
VCL Advancements: For Windows development, VCL sees styled custom title bars, improvements to TControlList, TFormTabsBar, TToggleSwitch, scrolling for TActionMainMenuBar, and updated WebView2 and Windows/WinRT API support.
Mobile Platform Support: Offers updated support for Android API level 35 (including Android 15 features like 16 KB memory page sizes) and iOS 18 (for both physical devices and iOS Simulator on Apple Silicon Macs), allowing developers to target current mobile devices with a shared FireMonkey codebase.

Delphi 13 Community Edition is available with a one-year term license, offering a modern and productive environment for building native applications for Windows and mobile platforms, free for qualifying users before they potentially upgrade to commercial editions.

The Gossip

Pining for Pascal Past

Many commenters express strong nostalgia for Delphi and its predecessor, Object Pascal, fondly recalling its ease of use for rapid application development and visual GUI building, especially when compared to contemporary C++ or directly interacting with the Win API. Users remember Borland's impact and how Delphi empowered single developers to create robust software, highlighting its intuitive 'Lego-like' component-based approach.

Delphi's Modern Dilemma

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around Delphi's current market position, its perceived prohibitive pricing for commercial licenses, and direct comparisons to free, open-source alternatives like Lazarus or widely adopted platforms like .NET. Commenters debate whether Delphi remains relevant for modern development, with some dismissing it as 'dead,' while others note its continued niche use in specific industries or regions like Germany.

Parsing Pascal's Peculiarities

Commenters delve into the technical aspects of the Pascal language itself, praising its cleanliness and readability, yet acknowledging its verbosity. The conversation touches upon the evolution of the language within Delphi versus Free Pascal/Lazarus, discussing specific features like managed records and the ease (or difficulty) of calling Windows APIs, with differing opinions on its clarity and modern feature set compared to other languages.