by Erick Engelke
Aug 31, 2025

Many people are surprised at how many developers still use Pascal in 2025.

There are interesting articles which talk about some use cases: revlo

Most modern pascals are based on Object Pascal, which has all the fancy object oriented features common to most popular languages but can also fallback to procedural code of basic Pascal in the same files. This allows incredible code life and code-reuse.

Delphi is less popular than it once was, but now supports Linux, Windows, Mac, Android and iOS natively with video accelleration on all supproted platforms.

The appropriately named FreePascal is very popular and offers a write onces, compile for anwyere feature. It has a great optional GUI (Lazarus) and can generate binaries for most modern 32/64 bit hardware, includes all popular devices from Raspberry Pis to tablets, phones, computers of all sorts, and output to JavaScript and WASM (web assembly).

There are several products which bring commercial Pascal to JavaScript. Namely Elevate Web Builder, and tms webcore. Both offer the ability to make advanced applications comparable to desktop apps but which run on mobile and computing devices like Macs, Windows, Linux, phones and tablets.

A key benefit of Pascal is that code written for one target platform is easily moved to another with few if any changes because it encourages use of good programming techniques.

There is also an 8/16 bit variant of pascal which outputs excellent binaries for 8088, 6502 and 68000 based devices from the 1980’s like GameBoys, Apples, Pets, C64s, etc.. It is tweaked for game development, called Turbo Rascal, and is instantly familiar.

Pascal and even Object Pascal are now available for almost every conceivable platform, offerring speed on par with any compiled language for that platform but also portability which give it legendary code reuse. And introduction of advanced features make it modern BUT well tested, unlike the flavour-of-the-day languages.

If you’ve used Pascal in the past, you probably have warm fuzzies about it, and there are free and low cost options available depending on your needs you can try for projects. But unlike coding of years ago, there are now many brilliant libraries which can do amazing things to extend your abilities.

There is also good marketability for those who can program in languages such as Pascal. It is becoming rarer in young programmers, but opportunies exist where there are existing code bases, and it may give you an edge in some interviews.

I use a variety of programming languages in my job, from C/C++ and its derivatives like PHP, shell scripts, etc. I’m aware of the benefits of each.

This post is not expected to convert anyone who has never used Pascal. But I do want to alert those interested to the various options where they may not have known. They already have "the skills" from their previous experience, because Pascal knowledge is very portable to practically every operating environment.