Benefits
I am using Delphi and continue using it because of the following benefits.
Delphi is a cross-platform tool. It allows to development of applications for Windows, iOS, macOS, and Android or applications for Linux.
Delphi is easy to use and designed for a rapid development approach for desktop development. According to my experience software development with Delphi is really easier and really more rapid if compared to any other development tools.
Delphi applications are easy to deploy since executables don’t need any pre-installed frameworks, and hence there is no headache about frameworks versioning, packages versioning, etc. And this is what I mean. If you have, for example, some .NET application you should know which .NET version your clients have, which packages they have, how it will be, will they have any conflicts, and you have to deploy assemblies and there are a lot of questions.
Delphi has a huge set of 3rd party components. There are many software companies that availed huge sets of components that can cover UI, background operations or show media, different cross-platform controls, web controls, and so on.
Of course, one more advantage is regular new releases of Delphi and RAD Studio from Embarcadero.
There are tons of software that were developed using Delphi 5, 7. They are all running without any issue even now in the new version of Windows operating systems. Right now it is possible to migrate that legacy software to the up-to-date Delphi versions without rewriting it from scratch.
Drawbacks
There are a few drawbacks of Delphi as all products have pros and cons.
The main drawback is the negative information noise around. In the 90s and 2000s, Delphi was studied in universities and now it’s replaced by other tools. Last year, as I remember, Embarcadero introduced a free version of Delphi (Community Edition) and now maybe different universities will again continue using Delphi and young people will study it during their classes. Again, today young developers consider Delphi to be obsolete, not fashionable technology. They did not look at Delphi seriously and spread rumors without understanding it and also they don’t have any supporting facts to say so. This is what they just hear and this is what I’m calling a negative information noise. Delphi is not an operating system owner. So this is self-explanatory why it’s always half a step back from Microsoft, Apple, or Google.
The supply of Delphi developers in the maker is scarce for the last couple of years. This created problems but the situation has changed now. The number of developers is increasing due to the availability of the free community version of Delphi.
Again, from my point of view, Delphi is not suitable for web development. I am talking about web development in classic understanding. If compared with native web technologies like Visual Studio and ASP.NET, Apache, and PHP, you don’t have a native for Delphi. But there are solutions for web developments from third-party software vendors like Web Core from TMS, IntraWeb from AtoZ, UniGUI from FM Soft.