Turbo Pascal and later Delphi were great! If Borland hadn't mismanaged everythin...

gryph0n · on March 19, 2015

I don't think Borland's mismanagement was a strong factor in C/C++ gaining mindshare.

The native OS interfaces on popular platforms (Win32, Posix) were in C, so it would have always been a 2nd class citizen.

I believe that Delphi was already on a decline when Borland decided to self destruct.

On Win32, they had a tough time competing after VisualBasic v5.0, where Microsoft had a larger mind-share.

On Linux, I had hopes with the Kylix port, but it was abandoned by Borland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kylix_(software)

pjmlp · on March 19, 2015

On Windows, Borland was always late with SDK support so we were forced to write our own wrappers. I gave up by Delphi 1.0, after being mainly focused on Turbo Pascal since the 5.5 version.

Regarding Kylix, I would say it was badly managed from the start.

So yeah, eventually the way out for better Windows support was C++/MFC, as even Borland's C++ compilers had their own set of issues.

But, this is a big but, if Borland managed to push Delphi the same way Sun pushed Java, then I think the mindshare story would be quite different.

A memory safe programming language, with RAD tooling support, capable of system programming tasks with native executables.