Bruce Gilham Jr.
Orphaned · the developers are retiring

Delphi is alive. Your Delphi 5 codebase, on components that no longer compile, is not.

Where you are

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.

How the move goes

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 Object Pascal well enough to tell you which.

Other platforms

Dead · support ended October 2021

Your Silverlight app has no browser to run in. The code still says what it does.

Dead · retired with Visual Studio 2015

LightSwitch generated your app. You cannot regenerate it, but you can read it.

Dying · no new development since 2000

Classic ASP still runs. No debugger, no tests, and it is your problem now.

Dying · VB6 IDE unsupported since 2008

The VB6 runtime still ships with Windows. The IDE and the developers are gone.

Dead · support ended January 2015

FoxPro. Yes, still. Someone has to open it.

Orphaned · HCL owns it; nobody is hiring for it

Your records are in Notes databases. Someone has to read the Notes data model to get them out.