Where is Delphi?

Had you heard that Epic dabbled with Delphi back in the 1990s? It’s true!

It was far more than dabbling though.

2025 marks the 1.0 release of Delphi. Regardless of whether you pronounce it del-fee or del-fy, it’s impressive that the platform and language is still available for sale today 30 years later (and has a healthy open source alternative Lazarus)! While Delphi never achieved the fame and fortunes of the elite technical stacks, it remained a valid and reasonable choice for building software for many companies for decades (and still does today on a much smaller scale).

Why isn’t Epic using it today if it was more than just a dabble?

One word: Borland.

A small R&D team had formed shortly after Delphi was released at Epic to investigate the possibility of building new and rebuilding existing Epic Windows applications using Delphi rather than the current choice of Visual Basic. While there were a number of technical issues with Visual Basic that could have been rectified by Epic teams better designing and architecting their applications, Visual Basic had a number of hard limits that were making application design and construction more challenging.

One slowly growing issue was the fact that applications weren’t “dynamic.” There was no practical way for a Visual Basic developer at the time to create an application from components and run an application efficiently based on configuration. There was no practical way to share code except for copies to be made. Creating anything reusable was a chore on a good day. It was disappointing, but we all knew even if we were afraid to admit it that Visual Basic was not the ideal programming language for a rapidly growing suite of connected applications.

Delphi offered Windows up on a wonderful platter of tasty IDE goodness. The IDE was as polished as Visual Basic (which was top of the class back then by a long shot). It exposed Windows APIs when needed, and provided ways to build components and libraries in a far more usable fashion. The provided component library (the Visual Component Library) was extensive and full source code was included! There was no magic as to how they’d built the library, so we could dive in deep and learn without guesswork.

Once the initial investigation happened, we cautiously green-lit the development of a replacement shell and library for all applications. Applications would be provided a shell and an extensive component library with comprehensive ways of building a more integrated and dynamic application experience.

There were 2 FTEs and one about half-time to quarter time.

We spent about 8 months working on the project and then in an afternoon we archived the project to shared NAS folder. Goodbye Delphi. 😢 It was never heard from or seen again at Epic (although last I knew the code was still in a folder on the shared NAS development drive zipped up until someone nukes it and no one misses it).

Delphi was a great platform that allowed us to fully exercise the Windows operating system and not be held back by the numerous limitations of Visual Basic. The development environment and langauge was remarkably freeing without the complexities of using Windows APIs directly or 😲: using the alternatives like the Microsoft Foundation Class libraries paired with C and C++ (my positive spin on that library is that it’s come a long way since it was first released in 1992 and has gone through a lot of growing pains).

What happened to Delphi at Epic?

Borland stock tanked: A LOT.

It’s frustratingly difficult to find the stock prices for a company that has undergone sales, etc. over the years. I can’t find the numbers. BUT, I recall the stock fell from around $80 to $2 in the course of a few months. Borland was struggling with product and market fit. Their revenue was down across the board and competitors like Microsoft were stepping up.

Betting the future Epic development platform on a product that may be sold or cancelled entirely was not a tenable plan. It was a disaster brewing. I know we fielded more than a few questions from then active Epic customers about whether Borland was a safe path for us.

Good news though!

In October of 1996, Microsoft announced Visual Basic 5 (beta). Epic had actually been on the beta program for quite a while, but relying on a “future” unpublished version wasn’t wise — there were a lot of changes happening and frequent updates (weirdly, I was the only person actually approved to access the beta due to the agreement we’d signed as it was some connections I’d established with a few amazing Microsoft support engineers that had ultimately provided us with access). Like with many Microsoft apps and platforms, the final shipping product often differs from the betas quite significantly.

Microsoft radically improved Visual Basic by adding control creation as part of the core environment and language. Not only could a developer create a packaged control that could be used by any ActiveX host, reusable code could be assembled into a compiled DLL (still as ActiveX, but with no UI). It was remarkable. It was all in Visual Basic. The final solution and techniques were a lot easier than Delphi too.

These changes were what Epic teams really needed to scale and share better than they had been. VB 5, now only 32 bit (thankfully) also allowed native code compilation, so gone were the days of interpreted code performance smells. Performance dramatically improved in many areas (but I’ll say that contrary to many untested opinions, the VB runtime interpreter was remarkably fast and was not a bottle-neck for many applications). This was still the era of Windows 95 being the primary OS, so there were still a lot of road-blocks, but the language and environment was no longer the stumbling block it had become in VB3. (Visual Basic 4 was primarily an upgrade to optional 32 bit support and some spit and polish).

Very shortly after, I pivoted to working on Visual Basic 5 infrastructure and building out the core Foundations GUI components that would be used for decades (thankfully retired now!).

I don’t miss Delphi at all, but it was a fun project.