Bruce Gilham Jr.
Orphaned · the developers are retiring

Delphi is alive. The one person who can read your Delphi 5 program is not on staff.

Where the business is

Embarcadero still ships Delphi. That is not the problem. The problem is a Delphi 5 or Delphi 7 application written twenty years ago by someone who has since left, on components that no longer compile, with the only person under sixty who can read Object Pascal already booked. Job postings for Delphi maintainers stay open for a year.

What I do about it

I learned Delphi in the 1990s in my father's shop and never stopped. I built a manufacturing execution product in it that is still sold twenty-five years later, and I have spent fourteen years building modern .NET on top of a Delphi/InterBase back office that the client rightly refused to throw away. Sometimes the right answer is to keep the Delphi and put a modern front on it. Sometimes it is a staged move to C#. I can read the code well enough to tell you which, and what each would cost.

Other platforms

Dead · support ended October 2021

Your Silverlight application has no browser left to run in, and the people who built it have gone.

Dead · retired with Visual Studio 2015

LightSwitch built your application. Nobody can change it now.

Dying · no new development since 2000

Classic ASP still runs. That is why it never gets fixed.

Dying · VB6 IDE unsupported since 2008

The VB6 runtime survives on Windows. The people who can maintain it are retiring.

Dead · support ended January 2015

FoxPro. Yes, still. And the business still depends on it.

Orphaned · HCL owns it; nobody is hiring for it

Your records are in Notes databases. Getting them out without losing them is the job.