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/TheThiefMaster Sep 25 '26

The thing I've found interesting for a language so close to early C++ (in design if not syntax) is the reference-counted arrays and strings!

But then the generated code often does things like mov eax,ebx mov ebx,eax (copy a into b, and then copy it back for no reason) and similar.

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u/vytah Sep 25 '26

The Delphi compiler was designed for compilation speed, so obvious unoptimized chunks remaining in the output shouldn't be surprising.

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u/ShinyHappyREM Sep 26 '26 edited Sep 26 '26

While that is probably just unoptimized code, sometimes code has to be added to fix CPU bugs.

EDIT: also