Which industries use Delphi most today?

Delphi still runs in production today mostly in industries with long-lived Windows desktop software: industrial automation and manufacturing, healthcare systems, financial and banking back-office tools, and government legacy systems. Borland shipped the first version of Delphi in 1995, building on the Object Pascal dialect that traces back to Turbo Pascal from 1983, and Embarcadero, a subsidiary of Idera since 2015, still puts out a yearly release.

What does that mean for teams maintaining these systems?

Object Pascal compiles straight to native Windows binaries, so a Delphi application written in the early 2000s can still run on a current Windows machine without a separate runtime to install. That is why manufacturing plants keep decades-old HMI panels running and why some hospital administration systems and banking teller applications never got rewritten: the software works, and replacing it costs more than maintaining it. The tradeoff shows up on the staffing side. Anyone inheriting one of these codebases usually has to learn an older VCL forms model, legacy data access layers like BDE or dbExpress, and UI patterns that predate modern web or mobile conventions.

Where does Delphi still get picked for new projects?

Genuinely new Delphi projects are uncommon outside of companies that already standardized on it, but they do happen. Equipment manufacturers building HMI and SCADA-adjacent control panels sometimes still choose Delphi because it compiles to a single native binary with direct access to the Windows API and no extra runtime dependency, which matters on machines that get updated rarely. FireMonkey, added with Delphi XE2 in 2011, extended that same codebase to macOS and mobile targets, so a manufacturer with existing Delphi expertise can build a companion mobile app without switching languages. Financial back-office tools follow a similar logic: a compiled executable that just runs is easier to certify and deploy in regulated environments than a stack with multiple runtime dependencies.

Maintenance or a rewrite: what's the practical call?

For a Delphi system already running in one of these industries, the decision usually comes down to developer availability rather than what the language can technically do. Object Pascal has a much smaller active developer pool than C#, Java, or Python, so finding someone to maintain an existing system typically takes longer than finding a developer for a mainstream stack. Teams starting something new outside of the niche cases above tend to pick a more actively supported framework. Teams with a Delphi system that already works tend to keep extending it, since the cost of a full rewrite rarely pays for itself against ongoing maintenance.

Updated: July 22, 2026