Hi there. My boss told me today "We have ordered borland delphi 2006 (expensive one) for all our developers, and this is going to be our main dev tool". So, after years of c/c++ and java development, I have to port myself to Delphi. I was a little unhappy with this, because Delphi is not as popular as other languages, and I'm very unfamiliar with the strange syntax of Delphi. As I understand, very good thing in Delphi is that it is compiled to native like c/c++, and doesnt require any VM or framework.................Ok, what do you think about Delphi in general and its possibilities in game development ?

Game development, not so good, due to the fact that there is no official API support (You're using unofficial header files). Speed wise, you won't get a difference from C++ - unlike Java or Visual Basic or many other languages, there is no big difference in how it works under the hood, just in the syntax (which allows the compiler to catch more errors and compile code faster). The whole #define in C exists partially so that programmers could do stuff like #define { begin #define } end.

Application wise Delphi is very good and one of the big secrets in the world of RAD development. You get speed for developing windowed application like Visual Basic, but without the weak syntax (in VB the easy stuff is made very easy, but the hard stuff is a nightmare of hacks and ugly, hard to debug code). Delphi tends to level things out by making everything moderately quickly and easy to do.

As for dependencies, Delphi is good there. Unlike Visual Basic, C# or even Visual C++ [MFC mostly], Delphi is 100% self contained. You get fairly beefy exe files because of this (a hello world window using VCL is about 400KB, though as you add code it doesn't go up very fast since most of that is the basic libraries being included), but it does make it very easy to deploy (unless you use the Borland database engine or something - using ADO is just as easy).

If you are using Delphi 2005/06 (haven't used or even read about 06) you'll get the choice between using a .NET version of Delphi (Delphi compiling to .NET code and using both .NET components and a .NET port of the VCL) and the regular Win32 version that makes the big executables.

However at this point I, and a lot of other Delphi programmers, are switching to C#. While it does add the requirement of .NET being installed, C# has a lot of advantages (even though we Delphi programmers have to learn that the string type/stringlist class is no longer a utility knife super variable that can do anything). C# was designed by the same guy who designed Delphi, and much as Delphi got so good because it was able to dump legacy syntax and coding conventions to become a premier Windows RAD environment, C# does the same, only for an environment that has changed a lot in the last decade. C# will also be a lot easier to learn if you already know C++ (though coming from Delphi it's not that hard either, C# is like a fusion of Delphi and C++ into one language)

The company I work for doing real time aplications, thats why they cannot work with .NET stuff. On the other hand, C/C++ is not so bug-free . So they desided to go with Delphi. Its code is fast and not as buggy as C/C++. What can I say, they pay me money thus I must agree with them :-)