As a different datapoint Pascal is still taught here in Romania in secondary school just as it was the case 20 years ago.

Bigger problem is that they teach the fundamentals with the abandonware that is turbo pascal instead of using something like the modern Free Pascal Compiler. Which means knowledge of what is possible outside curricula is limited.

Last year I almost was tasked with porting some Pascal codebase to a modern language. Problem was the project had a bus factor of 1, legacy overengineered and would only compile on windows with some proprietary compiler.

Maybe that company would use Claude/Codex or something like that, today, to port the project.

Additionally, it eventually shared the same backend with Borland C++, and nowadays C++ Builder.

Also Embarcadero has also adopted LLVM, while still having fast build times.

Comptime is the only thing going for it.

Object Pascal compilers were already super fast in MS-DOS hardware!

Sure. The rent does give you polish, however.

Also, for non-commercial use, Delphi is free.

Delphi would compile & link 2 MLOC of code on a crappy work laptop in 30 seconds to a minute. Incremental compiles were instant. So fast most developers never bothered learning the "go to next error" hotkey and just spammed F9 (compile & run) whenever they fixed a syntax error. It was that fast.

Trivial C interop - yes. Both pascal and cdecl style calling conventions.

Toolchain? Back then - yes. Today? Probably not; depends what you mean by it. It had perfect COM interop which mattered back then, and you could trivially link stuff if you wanted to. And people did.

Even PL/I, JOVIAL, and NEWP on the decade predating C had it.

Turbo Pascal 7 had them as well.

Thanks!

IMO it is not entirely dead, but not really "alive" either. TIOBE even has Object Pascal mentioned right now in TOP 20. Now, TIOBE has tons of issues, but it also means that there exists some tangible interest.

Still, I don't feel many people want to use Object Pascal these days. If you have the choice between Python and Object Pascal, most people will undoubtedly use Python. It's just how it is right now, and I also don't see how that can change in favour of Object Pascal. Programming languages nowadays have so much more competition, and people are less tolerant of flaws. Strangely enough, people barely seem to work on these flaws; this is one of my pet peeve with ruby, the documentation should be much better but it is not. I no longer find that acceptable in 2026, with AI spam slop lowering the quality and google search being terrible and almost totally useless nowadays. You'd assume that a counter-move to this slop-degradation would be to massively improve documentation, but you still find core projects in ruby or at the least important add-ons, to have low-quality documentation. And barely anybody wants to improve on that either.

To me it's less the verbose syntax but more the weirdness and inconsistency of it. Like making a distinction between a procedure and a function, or returning data from a function by assigning it to a magical variable. It feels like a cobbled-together language rather than a properly designed one.

I bought Delphi ages ago, but never got very far with it, which I regret.

I'd love to be able to take it up again, and this document looks very promising for that, esp. paired with:

https://wiki.freepascal.org/pas2js

which I now see is supported in Lazarus.

If someone has an example graphical project which compiles to an HTML page w/ JavaScript using the above, I'd love to see it and a detailed set of build instructions and notes on installing the needed toolchain and deployment. (as a note, I'm currently working in flet.dev using Python which allowed me to get a small prototype up-and-running, but I'm still looking into self-hosting and doing something more complex)

I think I last used Pascal, TurboPascal if I remember correctly, in school - perhaps at age 17 or something like that. I recall that we used to define some things from geometry, e. g. a triangle, calculating sides, angles, surface area and so forth, and then of some more objects from geometry.

I have not used Pascal since then but it was not the most terrible programming language of all times either. These days I would not know why I'd want to use it, compared to IMO better languages. Nonetheless I found it ok for teaching in school back then.

There's also a new book called Free Pascal From Square One released in 2025 that teaches programming and pascal

this is really neat to see and that it has support for any modern system. I don't know pascal and could be a fun way to learn it.

> 5.1. Remember to free the class instances > > The class instances have to be manually freed, otherwise you get memory leaks. > manual memory management in 2026?

Depends on compiler & runtime. If you pick Oxygene, for example, you get GC etc. https://www.remobjects.com/elements/oxygene/language