RAD Studio / Delphi

Delphi has been with us for more than 25 years and has evolved to be a versatile, consistent and reliable productivity tool in a technology landscape where technologies are constantly evolving.

By maintaining backward compatibility, the Embarcadero team has allowed applications and code written decades ago continue to work on the new versions as they are released.

Embarcadero's Delphi has had an interesting history, but Delphi is a continuation of the legacy of Turbo Pascal that was extremely popular in the 1980's and 90's.

Delphi is your daddy's Pascal! Delphi is known for being able to create native apps, compiling at lightning speeds.

With a single code base, you can target multiple platforms - Win32, Win64, iOS, Android32, Android64, MacOS (x64 and arm), and Linux64.

Traditional Windows developers would use the VCL (Visual Component Library) to build applications. The FireMonkey (FMX) framework was introduced as an alternative to allow for the same codebases to be multi-platform.

The product is segmented around 4 editions:

Community (free for personal projects and small businesses)
Professional (supports Windows, Android, iOS, MacOS with FireDAC supporting local database access only)
Enterprise (supports Linux with FireDAC supporting full database access)
Architect

An academic edition is also available for students.