How many people use Delphi?

[357mag 2]

I have not really dived into Delphi but it looks like a cool language to learn. I do have some books on it. My question is if you had to guess, is Delphi widely used, or is it kinda dead as a language?

[Stano 143]

Search for posts here. It has already been discussed here.

[programmerdelphi2k 237]

Just by the fact that you're asking this question, I think it's an initial answer: No, Delphi is not dead!

 

Second, the most commercially widespread programming languages are not necessarily the only ones on the market, because for each need there will be one or more possible solutions, depending on the specificities of each one. Thus, Delphi's life has been since 14/Feb/1995, and until now, it lives in 5 different environments (MSWindows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS).

 

Thus, you will find many programmers on the internet who still use the Delphi7 version in many projects, even if for many it seems obsolete to the extreme, however, they are also alive. Here, even on the forum, you will be able to see that many do not use the latest IDE, proving that, for various reasons (economic or otherwise), Delphi (Object Pascal) is a reliable language within its production niche!

[357mag 2]

I'm thinking I may start working with it soon. I'm just a hobbyist when it comes to programming, and I've had some fun doing it. 

[programmerdelphi2k 237]

for sure, you'll use many others, and for each niche, an answer it!

[Darian Miller 366]

3 Million.  Check out Embarcaero's home page...

 

Of course, sales & marketing's number might be based on fuzzy math.   🤠  I know it's likely a lot bigger than most people think.

 

 

Edited April 21, 2023 by Darian Miller

[Stefan Glienke 2019]

According to several sources, there are around 28 million software developers worldwide, give or take. I am highly skeptical that every 10th of them is a Delphi user. The number I have seen for C# is around 6 million.

 

The 2022 Stackoverflow survey had around 3.5% of the participants list Delphi for the question "Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year, and which do you want to work in over the next year?" - C# has 28-30% mentioned in that list.

 

If we check the 28mio software developers vs the 6 million C# users from some statistics with this percentage we see that this is somewhat realistic (30% of 28mio would be 8.4mio and 6mio out 28mio is around 21%). So we can assume that although Stackoverflow survey participants are not representative of the entire developer population we get kinda realistic numbers. If we assume that Delphi users were not overly invested in participating in the survey that leads us to around roughly 1mio.

[Attila Kovacs 631]

 

 

[David Schwartz 430]

I'd say that this is not a very meaningful question.

 

There are still tons of companies running IBM 3050 (?) emulators on 360 emulators on newer systems because the software has been running and stable for decades and the source code was lost a long time ago.

 

Delphi was really popular up until D7, when they made some changes that caused several popular component libraries to stop dead in their tracks, which is why D7 is still popular.

 

The truth is, there are TONS of Delphi apps built in the D4-D7 time-frame that are still running today. I suspect a huge chunk of EMBT's revenues come from such companies who keep their licenses up-to-date just in case they need to hire some folks to fix things.

 

Last place I worked, they had a team of 8 or so Delphi Devs who all quit at one point save two new guys, who were their for another decade. I was hired to replace one who had recently left, and while I was there the other one left. They hired a new guy and transitioned another fellow over from C# who didn't have much trouble learning Delphi, then cut me loose. That facility was on track to be generating $1.5 billion in revenues this year. The entire facility is driven by software written in Dephi between 2006 and 2010. Management there has been trying to replace the Delphi code since 2014, and has refused to allow it to be expanded or extended or anything. It's still their most stable, most reliabe and full-featured platform in the company, and they can't just shut it off without losing hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues. Delphi apps have become the platform companies love to hate -- they want to get rid of them, but they can't afford to.

 

For a decade now, the Delphi code has supported features beyond what their other platforms don't offer, and apparently can't offer. And the Delphi version has not had any new features added in TEN YEARS while the others have been under active development the entire time! Go figure! (They have had 30 devs working on the other platforms, and only two have been maintaining the Delphi code since 2014.)

 

Personally, it makes no sense to me. They've got a huge installed code base that's stable, reliable, and fully debugged. So why go with another platform where all of the code is new, will take a couple of years to get to where the Delphi version was three years earlier, and will be full of bugs for the next several years? Why not build the NEXT version in Dephi, re-use as much existing code as possible (reducing your programming needs to some extent) and save a huge amount on development costs? Like I said, Delphi is the platform that companies love to hate today.

 

Edited April 21, 2023 by David Schwartz

[KodeZwerg 54]

Pascal is dead - long live pascal!

[Wagner Landgraf 43]

4 minutes ago, David Schwartz said:

Personally, it makes no sense to me. They've got a huge installed code base that's stable, reliable, and fully debugged. So why go with another platform where all of the code is new, will take a couple of years to get to where the Delphi version was three years earlier, and will be full of bugs for the next several years? Why not build the NEXT version in Dephi, re-use as much existing code as possible (reducing your programming needs to some extent) and save a huge amount on development costs? Like I said, Delphi is the platform that companies love to hate today.

I've seen such pattern all the time, since many years already (it started right after the Delphi 2005 fiasco). I often agree that "rewrite our software in X" is usually a bad idea. And I've also seen that happen - many companies who tried to migrate to another platform failed, either spending lots of money, either not being able to develop a product as good as they have before in Delphi, and many other failure stories. If you think about it, even TMS history had similarities with that. We were a pre-Delphi 7 component vendor company, and after that period, many component vendors went doing something else of "migrated" to .NET. 

 

Of course there are successful stories of migration as well. But I understand the companies: I believe what scare them is Embarcadero behavior and their dependency. If they simply snap their finger and decided "no Delphi for you", many companies will have problems. But "no Delphi for you" I mean shutting down, not fixing bugs, not updating, whatever. It's a dangerous dependency. You might say "well, there are already doing that by not fixing bugs" and I would reply saying that that's the #1 reason I see companies *today* willing to migrate away from Delphi.

[Kryvich 165]

http://www.isdelphidead.com

[dummzeuch 1517]

Delphi is dead. Has been at least since 2003. Back then, everybody said that Visual Basic had killed it. Later it was C# and before that it was Java.

23 minutes ago, Kryvich said:

http://www.isdelphidead.com

 

Ok, on a more serious note:

Looking at the state of third party libraries and components, it looks a lot deader today that in the 1990s, but a bit more alive than 5 years ago.

Looking at the number of websites that mention Delphi and the number of questions about it on StackOverflow, it is certainly still declining.

 

On the other hand, a lot of things are happening and have been happening around it lately. Embarcadero seems to be a bit more active improving it. And even here on Delphi Praxis some new people have shown up.

 

But of course, Delphi is dead, compared to any of the main stream programming environments.

Edited April 22, 2023 by dummzeuch

[PingPIng 23]

I'm an old delphi user and I don't want to change programming language, but I actually notice little interest in developing in this language, interesting projects are started on github but then there isn't a community to carry them forward and develop them as for other languages.

Then there are some limitations of delphi (operator overloading for classes, memory management etc..) that should be resolved.

I lately consider the possibility of switching to another language for my projects (with regret).

[David Heffernan 2353]

7 hours ago, Kryvich said:

http://www.isdelphidead.com

Kind of funny that this site returns a page with a link to the emba site which in turn is a 404. Well, actually it's a 503 but whatever. 

 

So even if delphi isn't dead, isdelphidead.com is dead. A meta death if you will. 

Edited April 22, 2023 by David Heffernan

[Wagner Landgraf 43]

Just now, David Heffernan said:

Kind of cool that this site returns a page with a link to the emba site which in turn is a 404.

That link works fine for me.

[David Heffernan 2353]

31 minutes ago, Wagner Landgraf said:

That link works fine for me.

Click on the word no

[Wagner Landgraf 43]

5 minutes ago, David Heffernan said:

Click on the word no

I did. It works - on Safari. 

After you mentioned I tried in Chrome, and then it doesn't work. But it's not a 404, instead a connection refused.

Looks like it's because the link is insecure HTTP, which is rejected by Google but somehow Safari forces it to be HTTPS - which then works.

[programmerdelphi2k 237]

7 hours ago, dummzeuch said:

http://www.isdelphidead.com

needs "HTTPS://" and  https://www.isdelphidead.com

Edited April 22, 2023 by programmerdelphi2k

[shineworld 73]

Delphi is not DEAD is a very very OOP-powerful language.

It is fast.

It is simple and concise.

It is robust and safe.

It is productive (few lines of code compared to C++, Java, etc).

If completely customizable, you can modify any unit of any library (with sources) to do customized things.

Projects code has high longevity (I've moved old projects of 2007 to the latest versions with very few changes).

Support many platforms (I will hope in the future full direct support of Linux also for arm processors).

Long life to the Delphi!

[dummzeuch 1517]

16 hours ago, programmerdelphi2k said:

needs "HTTPS://" and  https://www.isdelphidead.com

Works fine for me with http.

 

With https I get a warning that the certificate is for a different domain. And if I force it, it then goes to that domain?! WTF?

Edited April 23, 2023 by dummzeuch

[David Heffernan 2353]

11 hours ago, shineworld said:

It is fast

Might be cast to develop, but the code produced by the Delphi compilers is slow

[Patrick PREMARTIN 82]

1 hour ago, David Heffernan said:

Might be cast to develop, but the code produced by the Delphi compilers is slow

in 28 years, never had any problem of speed on compiled exe and have seen Delphi programs in high speed environments like data acquisition from external devices

 

"Delphi is dead" is wrong. It will be if Embarcadero stop updating the libraries.

 

The Pascal language is rather alive, even if it is not seen everywhere.

 

A lot of "fresh" and "modern" languages on the market, too many choices for developers and their hierarchy. It's our job, as Delphi or Pascal developers, to help them to choose our environments and to show why it's a better choice than a lot of recent things from the GAFAM and others.

[shineworld 73]

1 hour ago, David Heffernan said:

Potrebbe essere lanciato per lo sviluppo, ma il codice prodotto dai compilatori Delphi è lento

I wrote "it's fast" not "it's the fastest".

 

In some things it is the same as C++, in others, it is slightly slower but not as bad.

I work on very large projects, the last one being about 19 million lines of code, where there is a lot of math and UI.

I don't regret C++, I've tried translating parts from Delphi to Visual Studio C++ and then embedded as a DLL with no significant gains,
but resulting in longer development times and adding debugging difficulties.

 

I use C and C++ a lot in the linux environment for embedded boards in ARM architecture, even if I have never seriously dealt with the freepascal counterpart, as in that environment you would navigate by sight.

Edited April 23, 2023 by shineworld

[David Heffernan 2353]

4 hours ago, Patrick PREMARTIN said:

in 28 years, never had any problem of speed on compiled exe and have seen Delphi programs in high speed environments like data acquisition from external devices

I'm happy for you that delphi is fast enough for you. It does produce slow code when compared to other mainstream modern compilers. 

 

4 hours ago, shineworld said:

In some things it is the same as C++, in others, it is slightly slower but not as bad.

I work on very large projects, the last one being about 19 million lines of code, where there is a lot of math and UI.

C++ is a language with many compilers. Some compilers are faster than others. So it doesn't make sense to compare delphi compilers to C++ as a whole. It's certainly the case that the fastest C++ compilers produce code that is much faster than delphi. Especially for maths. In fact for maths code it's astonishing how slow delphi is.