Delphi is still very impressive. However, they missed out on a much greater opportunity. Part of Delphi's crown jewels is VCL which can only be used on Windows. If you use Delphi for an OS other than Windows you have to use FireMonkey/FMX. Lazarus has LCL which is VERY similar to VCL, but LCL on Lazarus is not limited to Windows. One can write a LCL application and it works the same on Windows, macOS, and Linux. If Delphi had extended VCL to macOS and Linux it would have become much more valuable. Just my $0.02.

Don’t disagree that VCL across all the platforms would be a game changer.

However, the quality and reliability of the Delphi experience together with mobile support overcome the VCL/FMX trade off in my books.

I had high hopes for Kylix back around the turn of the millennium. At that time my company was looking moving an organization with field agents to a full Linux-based system. Our options were: 1. Keep the existing CA Clipper accounts receivable/accounts payable apps and run on emulated DOS. 2. Attempt to leverage the Harbour language (CA Clipper compatible web based thing). 3. Rewrite the system in Delphi/Kylix. We actually got fairly far with Kylix and I'll always be a fan of Delphi. In the end a pure web-based rewrite won over all those original options. I feel bad for whomever took over that old PHP4 stuff!

VCL was ported to linux in the "Kylix" product, for both Pascal and C++. It was non-free and didn't see any uptake really.

Granted, I never used Kylix, but it seems that it had all sorts of problems when it was first released. I don't remember, was Kylix available for Mac?

As far as I recall VCL was ported, but the IDE itself was running WINE (as it was written back then) and it was not very stable.

I just googled and Wikipedia seems to confirm my memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borland_Kylix#Features

Kylix apps in general looks like Windows apps, which is to say, rather out of place on a Linux desktop.

IIRC it wasn't VCL but another framework like VCL that was built on Qt.

LCL (Lazarus' equivalent of VCL) took another approach where the base stuff are very Windows-y (due to the VCL heritage) but the backends have to essentially implement not only the backend-specific (Gtk, Qt, etc) widget functionality but also a small subset of the Windows API.

While this makes porting harder for the Lazarus developers, it makes it easier to port stuff between OSes and even port stuff from Delphi to Lazarus (some developers can also use both Delphi and Lazarus - e.g. AFAIK Total Commander uses Delphi for the 32bit builds and Lazarus for the 64bit builds).

It was called CLX, forms were stored in *.xfm, and it was based on Qt