As much as I love making old code new I'm not sure I could stomach a 10 year project.
It's not really 1 x ten year project as such, but heaps of smaller 3-6 month projects (many running in parallel) to add chunks of new functionality (as microservices) and rewrite parts of the monolith that we can cleanly cleave off.
New parts of UI that are needed don't get added to the Delphi app, but get built as web pages (using React mostly at the moment), which get launched in Chrome windows from the Delphi application.
One day our Delphi app will be an empty shell of it's former self and we can have a huge decommissioning ceremony (party!), but that day's still a long way off... :)
I think that enterprise-first strategy has dried up any chances for a community to exist.
We use primarily use Delphi for productivity reasons and think that unless they change their go to market approach, chances of a community reappearing are low.
Perhaps after they have already completed milking enterprise customers, they try to switch to a model of $99/year subscription-only model with a single high quality IDE product and then a community suddenly reappears.
For both elements, embarcadero and freepascal the promise of easy cross compilation is the most attractive feature in my eyes.
I started programming in Turbo Pascal 20 years ago or so, but I don't know... coming back to the language these days doesn't sound like the most efficient use of my time.
Embarcadero/Inprise/Idera or whatever they are calling themselves these days have zero vision.
[1] See: https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/product-editions
$5999 first year, $2569/yr renewal
Even with a Pro it's also not just VS itself, but a bunch of other MS products. The exact list depends on how you arrive at getting a subscription, but if you are to take the BizSpark (?) route, it will get you Windows, Windows Server, Office licenses and a handful of Azure credits.
The target customers for the paid editions obviously are developers of custom line of bussines applications. And in that case the license cost is somewhat justified, as the IDE and it's libraries are essentially directly usable for that, while everyone developing similar things in notionally free of charge Visual Studio is going to buy DevExpress and ReSharper.
"If you're a small company or organization without revenue (or up to $5,000 per year in revenue), you can also use the Delphi Community Edition. Once your company's total revenue reaches US $5,000, or your team expands to more than 5 developers, you can move up to an unrestricted commercial license with Professional edition."
In other words, CE only caters to students and those will not invest their time in a dying platform if they are smart.
Same happened to ExtJs.
Kinda weird for Delphi, as it wasn't really enterprise software during its heyday, but very popular for mid-sided businesses.
Embarcadero prices aren't much different from DB2, Oracle, Visual Studio Ultimate.
And in turn, you get a lot of job offers rewriting Delphi software in C#.
Scheduling software and low level control for stuff like BioTek and PerkinElmer devices, for example.
http://www.perkinelmer.com/product/envision-hts-plate-reader...
https://www.biotek.com/peripherals/index.html
In Germany you still get Delphi related conferences.
I really dont know who their target customer is, but then again, when I look around, I find tools like windev (PC-Soft) and Clarion (softvelocity) have a loyal following
Except of course that embarcadero, is way more expensive
Free-pascal is cute and probably productive, but there are way more intellectually and technically interesting options, even tcl/tk in my opinion is better intellectual and technical investment of time compare to free-pascal