[DanielHB]

Turbo Pascal had breakpoints, variable inspections in the late 80s. I think it had stack traces too but not 100% sure.

I am not old enough to have used it professionally, but my teacher used it for teaching intro programming in the early 2000s. So I used it quite a lot, the debugger was great and the development loop was so tight. Not until I got into web dev did it ever feel "fast" to make change->see change. To this day it is still bad in most stacks.

[adrian_b]

The earlier Microsoft compilers included since 1985 the debugger CodeView, which could do all that and much more.

Around 1990, the development tools offered by Borland and Microsoft for C and C++ were pretty much equivalent and they both were quite good.

While the Borland languages were like "Turbo-X", the Microsoft languages were like "Quick-X".

The greatest difference between the commercial software available at that time and what exists today is that everything was accompanied by a set of high quality manuals that could teach you anything that one would want to know. Nowadays the quality of technical documentation is usually much worse.

[pjmlp]

I think there was a certain irony, that Borland gave up on Turbo BASIC, while Microsoft gave up on Quick Pascal.

[kristopolous]

That wasn't the banger for vs6 it was the workflow and muscle memory of the thing. The flow is still unmatched IMHO. It was like avid or photoshop for writing windows software.

Default keys in modern IDEs are basically still the vs assignments from the 5/6 era.

It was the closest Microsoft ever came to making their own emacs or vim. vs6 was like 90% of my screen time as a windows dev in the 90s and 2000s

I've been a linux user for 30 years ... I never had the vs6 level of efficiency in linux, still don't. NetBeans was the closest ... yes, NetBeans... (I've given up though, I do things in nvim, tmux and suffer)

[galangalalgol]

I find vscode with the right plugins better than vs6 was by a long shot. Helix is pretty amazing too.

[imron]

The debugger doesn’t even come close

[pjmlp]

QtCreator, KDevelop, JetBrains, Eclipse also exist on Linux.

Especially KDevelop as closest.

[georgeecollins]

Turbo Pascal was amazing for its time. As a young person learning programming it was a step change in functionality. Before that on PCs you were using Basic or assembly It was cheap and incredibly useful.

[imron]

All the good borland devs were poached by Microsoft. VC5 and 6 were the spiritual successors of the Turbo XXX family of IDEs.

[icelusxl]

Yes, Turbo Pascal 5.0 introduced those features in 1988.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNx4dxXptUg

[haspok]

Yes, but if you compare the complexity of (Turbo) Pascal to the complexity of C++... language, environment, libraries and cross-compilation...

(A nice thought-experiment is to ask if Quake could have been coded in TP at all - even if memory hadn't been an issue (I think there was no DOS extender for TP, but I could be wrong).)

[invader]

In the storm of Doom-Quake mania of the mid 90s there was Chasm: The Rift by a small Ukrainian company Action Forms. And if memory serves me right, it was created in Turbo Pascal. It was late in development and came out in 1997 after Quake, so it didn't get much traction. But the engine, though pretty limited, could produce 3D enemies with interesting effects not found even in Quake.

So Turbo Pascal (with a whole bunch of x86 asm inclusions) was totally capable of producing Quake-level games. I myself, in the late 90s, discovered the hidden capacities when I learned x86 assembly from Peter Abel's book. Once I got rid of the primitive TP BGI library and switched to VGA 13h, it was an unbelievable level up in abilities to manipulate pixels on the screen!

[Narishma]

> Chasm: The Rift

I might be misremembering but I thought it was more of a Doom-style engine with 3d models instead of sprites for the entities, rather than a full 3d engine like Quake.

[invader]

It was definitely something unorthodox - I remember being confused about how it actually worked.

The first time I played, I thought "It is just like Quake". Then you start to notice that the levels are pretty limited - it is all narrow corridors with rare small chambers and open spaces, no steep elevation changes, no rooms above rooms... Kinda like Doom. But then, father's examination shows sloped surfaces, shelves and bridges - stuff the Doom engine can't do.

Maybe, for level geometry, it is closer to portal rendering engines like Build. Still looks pretty claustrophobic even compared to Doom and Duke Nukem 3D. I feel the Chasm level designers could've got more variety from that technology, but again, maybe that was some fundamental limitation. Or maybe it is just like FPS were designed in the mid 90s.

Monsters, items and weapons are fully 3D, though. With dynamic lighting!

[bluedino]

I don't see why it couldn't have been written in Pascal. Plus, Quake was written in C/asm, not C++.

[pjmlp]

Plenty of games used Turbo Pascal as well, and it was for a long time the favourite language on PC demoscene.

Additionally most hit games back then were full of inline Assembly, regardless of the high level language, or even written 100% in Assembly.

Turbo Pascal 7 had a DOS extender.

There was Turbo Pascal for Windows 3.1, and with Delphi it started to be even more C++ influence with Pascal syntax, and safety first.