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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

358 points ofalkaed | 7 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.716s | source | bottom

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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Havoc ◴[12 Oct 25 09:40 UTC] No.45556825[source]▶
Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context.

Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.

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1. le-mark ◴[12 Oct 25 11:54 UTC] No.45557529[source]▶
Iirc Delphi didn’t have threads, sockets, or OS integration (signals, file watching …). So it wasn’t suited to systems programming ie servers and services. It nailed gui applications, and that was a lot. Maybe freepascal has threads and sockets but imo it was too late.
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2. detaro ◴[12 Oct 25 12:04 UTC] No.45557600[source]▶
Maybe not in the earliest versions, but by the late 90s, when I learned it, it certainly had those things.
3. Havoc ◴[12 Oct 25 12:27 UTC] No.45557730[source]▶
Not sure earlier versions, but Delphi 5 (~1999) definitely had all those. Plausible that it was added much later than in C/C++ world though
4. chadcmulligan ◴[12 Oct 25 12:45 UTC] No.45557856[source]▶
I have written a number of services in Delphi, some 20 years ago, all works fine.
5. rs186 ◴[12 Oct 25 13:13 UTC] No.45558018[source]▶
Eh, sounds like that wouldn't be a problem for education purposes as the parent suggests? You need to be doing some really specific to leverage threads/file watching. And people probably use C to teach threads anyway.

Of course, being a good teaching language probably doesn't make the language popular or even survive. Python is so widely used not necessarily because it's simple to learn but because of its ecosystem.

6. badsectoracula ◴[12 Oct 25 14:18 UTC] No.45558406[source]▶
Delphi 2, the first 32bit version of Delphi, had all of this. Some, like threads, even had wrappers (TThread), but Delphi came with Win32 bindings out of the box so all Win32 functions were available too - and it came bundled with documentation for the APIs. In addition, calling out to a DLL was trivial so even if a function wasn't available, you could just define it. Pretty much anything you could do with a C compiler was possible with Delphi 2 too.

Free Pascal obviously has all of that stuff too.

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7. knotie ◴[15 Oct 25 08:56 UTC] No.45589767[source]▶
I had the pleasure/pain of maintaining a Delphi 2 app for 6 months in 2014... It was buggy as hell and crashed all the time. All the things you've mentioned were indeed included out of the box. The IDE was pretty much a direct recompile of the of the Delphi 1 IDE with some minimal additions to support Win32. Oh, there was no interfaces (or COM, obviously).

The only reason the company hadn't moved off Delphi 2 was that they hadn't bought the code for a couple of 3rd party components before the 3rd parties went bust... So they were stuck. I had rewritten chunks of it to remove those dependencies before I left, after I had fix the hundreds of thousands of hints and warnings (!).

Delphi 2 was late, and it was rushed out before it was finished. Delphi 3 was rock solid and was the true successor to Delphi 1.