[benibela]

I agree with that.

20 years ago I started using Delphi and it was great. The debugger then was much better than GDB is now; the form designer better than current ides; it compiles projects faster on 20 year old hardware than current languages compile on current hardware; with copy-on-write strings it basically had mutability xor aliasing for strings.

But no one wants to use Delphi anymore, because it is not open-source.

Unfortunately I made my projects open-source, and now need to keep maintaining them. But there is no advantage being open-source. There are almost no contributions, because no one knows Delphi/Pascal anymore. There are basically no maintained, working libraries to use. I have even ported my projects to FreePascal/Lazarus, the open-source Delphi alternative. But that made everything worse. Open-source is incredible buggy.

Things I had to deal with this week: Recent binutils versions have relro enabled by default, but their relro is not compatible with FreePascal. With relro enabled my apps do not start anymore. The string builder in FreePascal allocates buffers that are too small for its data. When GDB catches an exception in a GTK2 GUI while a menu is open, it freezes the entire X server. You have to leave the X server and kill gdb from another tty, before you can even move the mouse again.