The compiler was lightning fast, and produced fast code. The IDE was fast. It did a beautiful code/visual synchronization that still hasn't been done better. It had good libraries, and did effective programming the large.
Not cross-platform, didn't have automatic memory management, though, and was never going to be able to compete with the advance of free IDEs.
About a million years ago I wrote the Delphi Container and Algorithm Library (DeCAL). Good times :)
This is one reason why I see Go compilation speed as PR.
Anyone of us that had the luck to work with tooling in the Amiga/Atari/PC world back in the day C mostly still only relevant on UNIX, knows there were a few languages with very fast compilers available.
Go's compilation speed is more than PR. It's reality when compared against what it is designed to replace. Believe me, there are several people on the Go team who fondly remember the "old" days of Turbo Pascal, for instance. But those tools just aren't around any more for practical purposes.
Last time people were bandying about Go compilation speeds on HN, and actually posted numbers, it was trivially beat by gcc on compilation speed when I tested..
Maybe it's faster now? But it certainly wasn't particularly impressive a year or so ago.
It was crossplatform for a time, kylix ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylix_(software) ) was delphi for linux, it worked okay but compared to delphi the produced binaries was not dependency free.
Yes, I used the name Borland loosely. As a liker and user of Borland products (earlier), I did keep some track, of all the company restructuring, selling off of divisions, renaming, etc. E.g.: Borland -> Inprise -> CodeGear -> Embarcadero. But didn't correlate the exact dates of company changes with product releases. Not worth it.
I was in deep at that point. Interbase 6.5 was becoming FireBirdSQL. No one really knew WHAT was going to happen in the open source landscape. I was at a convention and it really did appear that Kylix had a valid foot forward. In retrospect, I would have totally gone in a different direction. The web wasn't "there" yet. We were still doing Perl and rudimentary PHP 3/MySQL 3 stuff. It was a gamble on their part, but I can't say I'd have gone the other way.
Not cross-platform, didn't have automatic memory management, though, and was never going to be able to compete with the advance of free IDEs.
About a million years ago I wrote the Delphi Container and Algorithm Library (DeCAL). Good times :)