It's amazing how underestimated the Object Pascal language is. Certain people or rivals want to write it off or declare it's "dead", yet the language (including various dialects) are still going strong.
Comptime? Vastly superior toolchain? Trivial C interop? Sub-second incremental compilation in large projects? I'm not familiar with Object Pascal at all, so do correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd really be surprised if it has much of Zig's standout features.
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.
baranul · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Otherwise it would still be a big contender.
Everything that Zig offers over C as selling point was already there in Object Pascal.
applfanboysbgon · · focus · HN ↗
mickeyp · · focus · HN ↗
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.
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Ironically it is still easier in Delphi than the frameworks Microsoft keeps pouring out for .NET and C++.
I keep joking they should afford some Embarcadero licenses to learn how to actually do it.