Reading through the docs, it was nice seeing that Pascal wasn't sitting still through all the these years. Generics, extension methods (class helpers) and value types - though the last features actually existed way before class, and I've extensively used it back in the day, old style objects are unsafe and were abandoned for a while without being fixed.

Too bad that memory management is still tedious and categorically unsafe with all sorts of crazy hacks like a TComponent hierarchy and reference counting that exists only for interface.

It was a reasonable trade-off for me back in the days where the best thing C++ had was auto_ptr and a bunch of incompatible vendor specific classes. Nowadays, it's a world I wouldn't want to come back to (or I would happily programming C).