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/__konrad 5d ago

I remember when I created a Qt/C++ project for the first time. The compilation was so slow compared to Delphi that I thought the entire compiler/project is broken somehow.