FREE Delphi Starter Edition

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TL;DR

 Delphi and C++ Builder Starter Editions now Free

Many of you may not remember the glory days of Delphi. 

There was a time when Borland was the king of compilers: Turbo C++, Turbo Pascal, Turbo Basic... The breakthrough was with Delphi, a RAD studio IDE backed by the Pascal programming language (updated with OOP concepts and now called Object Pascal). Delphi provided a drag-and-drop window designer and went head-to-head with Visual Basic. It was wildly popular and the Win32 landscape is littered with important projects that used Delphi. Here are a few:
  • Dev-Cpp (90,760 downloads at Sourceforge last week, by the way)
  • Inno Setup (Popular installer package)
  • WinRAR
  • Just Basic / Liberty Basic
  • FL Studio / Fruity Loops Digital Audio Workstation
  • GameMaker Studio
  • ...
In any case, there was a lot of great software made with Delphi. Pascal is pretty good to work with once you master it and the Delphi IDE made it really fast to build desktop applications. We're talking native code that ran fast, even on the legacy hardware of the day.

I barely hear Delphi mentioned anymore. It's still pretty widely used in some enterprise environments, but has fallen off the face of the earth in the hobby/casual/OSS community. A license for the IDE is quite expensive (for personal, hobby use). A few years ago, Embarcadero (the current owner of Delphi) came out with a Starter edition. It was hobbled compared to the pro version and still cost $300! In a world where most programming tools are now free and open source (even Visual Studio) that's a ton of cash for a feature-limited release.

This has really hurt Delphi in my opinion. From being a top contender for writing desktop apps, it's fallen to a niche tool for enterprise. Why would I pay $300 to get Delphi, learn Pascal, to build Win32 apps when I can use Microsoft's own C# for free? The C# community is huge and helpful and jobs abound... Most Delphi jobs today are looking for people to port Delphi to .NET anyway.

But that doesn't mean that Delphi isn't great. I can't speak to the new cross-platform stuff, but for building native Win32 apps with a visual designer, there aren't many options that can compete. Visual Studio offers C++, but without the visual UI builder. There are a handful of BASICs out there, but those are dwindling too. Delphi actually might be the last of the great native, Win32 RAD tools available.

Today, Embarcadero announced that they are making the Starter Edition FREE. I think this is a huge step toward renewing a community. Licensing has always hampered the maintenance of OSS projects written in Delphi, but now there's potentially a free option. Additionally, the door is finally wide open allowing people to learn and use Delphi as a hobby, or for side projects (many of which are likely to be open sourced, as well). Maybe it's too little, too late, but I think there will be some interest in Delphi so long as there is a free entry point to the ecosystem. 

It's also worth noting that Delphi's proprietary IDE isn't the only player. There is the free, OSS and robust Lazarus IDE which mimics the features of Delphi (7) quite nicely. It's a powerful tool and feels like the successor to what's left of Delphi's legacy. That being said, most of the existing projects from yesteryear use Delphi and would require some (?) porting to work with Lazarus. This might be a better solution for the long-term viability of those projects.

Either way, a free option of Delphi certainly can't hurt the Pascal development ecosystem. Perhaps you should give it a try.

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