The only reason Delphi died (although it hasn't) is because of poor decision making by Borland in their hay-day, coupled with the fact they were competing with the might of Microsoft (who also ship the libraries and even freeware compilers) meaning many gravitated towards C over Delphi. Also, I hear, MS bought out loads of Borland's team.
As a language, Pascal is superior imho. It was, after all, made to create good programming practices:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_(programming_language)
And came after C.
I think C is a terrible language and this becomes more apparent when you see mediocre code that will then not compile properly on another compiler.
If you want to create a portable, self sustained program that will work almost universally when you ship the source to another person, then Delphi - or any other high level language - is the way to go. I don't need to mess about with memory management, crazy syntax, and other annoyances.
Of course, no-one is going to agree on this - but I'll dance the day that C dies.
![Grin ;D](https://forums.qhimm.com/Smileys/akyhne/grin.gif)
The trouble we've been having with Aali's source would never ever have happened with Delphi - the language simply doesn't allow for it.
The trouble with Aali's source is just due to it being a large project with no sensible build system, and no management for its dependencies, it has nothing to do with the C language specifically. Also the reason that similar C code may not compile on different compilers is directly related to other strengths of the language and it's very wide adoption, namely:
1: Unlike other languages, there are actually different compilers as no single organization "owns" C and it's useful enough in a wide range of domains to warrant compilers optimized for specific types of problems. Also competition leads to innovation and both gcc and MSVC are incredibly good compilers by pretty much any measure, capable of extremely sophisticated optimizations.
2: It does not have the additional overhead of an interpreter or a runtime virtual machine (like JVM or BEAM) so the machine code runs without any other layers of virtualization.
It's also actually the most portable language that doesn't require some immense amount of overhead, and there are many domains it is *exclusively* suited for.
Pascal (and probably Delphi too), for example -- is way less portable than C or C++, getting it to work on anything other than windows would be a nightmare. People program toasters in C, robots, and a large maority of embedded systems. As the easiest and most portable non-interpreted or runtime VM based language, C enjoys many advantages in a great number of circumstances. Those advantages have tradeoffs of course, but so does the convenience and hand-holding of C's competitors.
You may not like it -- but C and C++ (especially C) are the de facto languages of systems programming, embedded systems, games programming, drivers, vms, compilers, interpreters and any performance sensitive task for a very, VERY good reason.
I hate to say it, but you're gonna be waiting a long time if you're hoping for it do die =p. It's been forty years and nothing has really threatened it's position in any of the above domains.
Also Pascal (I don't know about Delphi's history specifically) lost to C because of the rise of Linux, crappy portability, poor (and late) advanced OOP extensions, and being too verbose (ok, the last one is just my opinion). No language with a single proprietary 'creator" which doesn't open source it's compiler is ever going to keep up with a language like C/C++, which has huge communities improving gcc/domain optimized toolchains and contributing to new new language versions to this day. So Microsoft may have played a role, but there was definitely more than that to the story