[cstejerean]

There's a bit of a gap there though between 1996 and Visual Basic classic being discontinued. VB.NET came out in 2002 but VB6 was supported until 2008.

VB5 in 1997 and VB6 in 1998 really closed the gap with Delphi from what I remember.

[jules22]

VB5/6 had native code compilers. Performance wise, the gap was reduced. But it still was only object based and not full OOP, VCL was much better in all respects, so were the GUI builders. The component ecosystem was much better, despite having a much smaller user base. I prefer not to use Object Pascal today, but back then, it was superior to using VC++ or VB.