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by leledumbo 3641 days ago
I agree with your first 2 sentences, which Modern Pascal is just as capable, if not more, than Java. Lazarus is an example of such complex project, it has near 5 MLoC (without external dependencies) according to openhub and is managed just fine, thanks to the compiler's smart dependency management.

Modern Pascal is a very good language of choice when you have tight budget but still want to compete with enterprise Java systems. The low resource requirement is one prominent factor while the performance is similar if not better in real world applications. We have one of our apps (web application with embedded web server, proxified by nginx) running constant 100MB RAM only at peak, single process, while serving tens of thousands of users, backed only by a single SQLite database. Even the 100MB is mostly due to our template engine automatic caching system.

Java will win in microbenchmarks, but that's the best HotSpot JVM can do. Tight loops and complex calculations are actually seldom happened in enterprise apps, while context switching happens a lot more often as (a lot of) users move from one context to another frequently.

2 comments

Thanks, that's really interesting. I'm not surprised that Pascal applications are very fast - after all, it's native. My main concern is the maturity of ecosystem - tools, libraries, frameworks, everything that defines the TCO (development + distribution + maintenance) of modern application. It's good to know that something exists in this field and there are examples of live apps and it would be interesting to compare the stacks and their capabilities.
Hello, is that web app using Brook framework, mORMot or anything else?