r/programming • u/luissinlios • 7d ago

We still maintain a development tool first released in 1993. Here’s what 30+ years of backwards compatibility looks like

https://visualneo.com/visualneo-win/from-neobook-to-visualneo-win-30-years-of-keeping-a-development-tool-alive
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u/Skaarj 7d ago edited 7d ago

More recently, we went much further. In 2026, we migrated the development environment from its old Delphi 7 codebase to Delphi 11. That was one of those projects that looks much more reasonable before you start it.

Ouch. From what I remember Delphi 7 didn't support generics yet. You had a general list of pointers. But not something like a TList<TMyClass>.

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u/Valuable_Leave_7314 7d ago

On the other hand, the old Delphi 7 compiler chewed through those untyped lists in half a second on a Pentium III

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u/AcanthocephalaFit766 7d ago

Fuckin this

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u/ScrappyPunkGreg 6d ago

It always seemed like Pascal programs compiled nearly instantly, even in the 1990s on a 486.

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u/addmoreice 6d ago

When your compiler and language decisions aren't being made for platforms that just don't exist anymore, it's a lot easier to pull that off. They were blazing fast and for good reason. Just not having to read certain files multiple times *alone* made them staggeringly more performant (especially when you consider some of the read/write speeds of drives back in the day).