One of the great things about Delphi and its predecessor Object Pascal were, besides what other HNers have mentioned, was AOT compilation, being memory safe and allowing systems programming at the same time.
No need for VMs.
Luckly Go, Rust, D and now .NET Native might make younger generations aware of it.
Delphi is the IDE and compiler, Object Pascal is the language (Free Pascal Compiler and GNU Pascal are two other compilers, both exhibit the same quick and safe compilation).
Object Pascal was designed at Apple as their extensions to Pascal while using it as system programming language to develop the first versions of Mac OS.
Afterwards, Borland extended Turbo Pascal with Apple's agreement and then Turbo Pascal 5.5 was born.
After the initial versions of Delphi, the Borland marketing team decided it was a bit confusing to have Delphi and Object Pascal as names, and decided to start referring to the language as Delphi as well.
I was a Turbo Pascal user since version 3.0 all the way up to the first versions of Delphi.
Yes I'm quite aware of the history but the fact that borland/embarcadero choses to call both delphi doesn't really change what I said though, every where besides the marketing of this IDE clearly considers object pascal [1] as the language (with several implementations/compilers), and delphi [2] as the IDE.
Delphi's own documentation, once you're past the marketing naming on the box, makes it clear that the language is object pascal.
The current language is based on Object Pascal, which is quite different from being Object Pascal, which was quite different back in the Turbo Pascal and early Delphi days.
I don't know Delphi and Turbo Pascal history from Wikipedia, I lived through it, from Turbo Pascal 3.0 up to Delphi version 3.
No need for VMs.
Luckly Go, Rust, D and now .NET Native might make younger generations aware of it.