TG: Programming: Why Delphi 13 Sucks

Home - Programming - Why Delphi 13 Sucks

Have you ever purchased something thinking, "I have the old model, I love it, and it's been a long time, so the newest model is sure to be amazing!" Only to buy the new model and realize that the company has lost its damn mind and completely jacked up the thing you loved?

Delphi Seattle was great. Really. I got a LOT of work done building native Windows services, servers, and applications with it. It wasn't cheap, but it was totally worth it. And because I sequester my development and test environments, it's installed on a Windows 7 32 bit VM from about 10 years ago.

But with the advent of AI and the change in my professional roles, it was time to update my toolchain. So I spun up a new virtual machine, I purchased and installed Windows 11, and purchased a license for Embarcadero's Delphi 13 Florence RAD Studio. I got everything installed and working. Wow! Bright and shiny!

Well, bright in the sense of colors, but not intelligence. And the shine disappeared almost immediately. Let's skip past what a complete, steaming, pile of slow, bloated, overly commercialized, crap Windows 11 is. I've done everything I can to optimize it, rip out the advertising and junk apps that it comes with. I won't bore you with the problems it has architecturally; that's in another post. No, let's focus on what Embarcadero has done to kill Delphi.

Cross compilation works. So there's that. But if you thought you were going to just pull your projects into a directory and fire up D13 and, after a little project settings upgrade, build and test your applications, you would be sadly mistaken. Unlike past versions of Delphi, 13 is not 100% backwardly compatible. Properties on VCL classes have disappeared with no explanation. Something as simple as the Color property on TTabsheet objects has been removed. Why? What possible reason is there for that? Now, if I want to set a background color, I have to drop a panel on the tabsheet and set its alignment to alClient, then set the color of the panel.

Did you like the Refactor feature? Permanently greyed out.

Did you like the code reformat feature? Gone.

Did you like the speed of the GUI development tools? Yeah, not so snappy anymore.

Did you think they would be smart enough to provide a direct linkage between Delphi and some of the agentic AI tools out there? HAH!! I have been using Claude Code in a terminal to code and unit test some minor apps, but there's no direct linkage between the two.

But it gets worse. Much worse. I've tried a number of times to get support for the problems I'm running into, but it's impossible to reach them. I've put in tickets for the refactor issue and gotten no response at all. For that alone I'm ready to sue for my money back. What good is a support agreement if you can't get support???

Embarcadero continues to kill off Delphi with a thousand tiny, and sometimes not so tiny, cuts. The fact that Windows 11 sucks so bad and makes the virtual machine almost unusably slow doesn't help. I'm at a point where I'm finding excuses to not use Delphi. For some products, I'm considering dropping back to Delphi Seattle for maintenance. For others, I'm trying to figure out how to recreate them as web applications. One of them, my licensing and registration service, is now a web app written using Laravel and Filament, and I'm super happy with it.

I'm going to try again to reach someone over there. Wish me luck. And don't ever buy Embarcadero products. If you use them now, don't upgrade. And as soon a you can, switch to a different technology stack. There's no excuse for paying $3000 for a lemon.