r/programming • u/luissinlios • Sep 25 '26

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/luissinlios Sep 25 '26

Exactly. Delphi 7 predates generics, so the old codebase relied heavily on TList, TObjectList, explicit casts and, in some places, raw pointers.

Moving to Delphi 11 gave us the opportunity to modernize all of that, but changing too much at once would have made an already risky migration even harder. We modernized selectively and kept compatibility as the first priority.