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coldcode | 4 months ago

I used Borland Turbo Pascal in 1984. It was amazing to work with something so fast on a PC that was really so slow. No IDE/Compiler since then matched the speed. Today's code is massively more sophisticated and complex, so there is no way to match that performance today despite the speed of computers today.

discuss

elevation|4 months ago

I got a windows 95 66MHz Pentium machine with 16MB ram at a yard sale in 2002. Visual Studio 5 Enterprise worked plenty fast on that with features I still miss (or which don’t perform as well) in modern environments.

chadcmulligan|4 months ago

Have you tried Delphi lately, very fast, compiles in less than a second.

1313ed01|4 months ago

Came here to share this mandatory link on this subject, Dadgm's Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than: https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

I used Turbo Pascal 2 as late as 1991, if not later, because that was the version we had. It was really fast on a 386 40 MHz or whatever exact type of PC we had then. A bit limiting perhaps that it only came with a library for CGA graphics, but on the other hand it made everything simpler and it was good for learning.

A few years ago I wanted to run my old Turbo Pascal games and decided to port to Free Pascal. Sadly Free Pascal turned out to only ship with the graphics library introduced in Turbo Pascal 4, but on the other hand I got a few hours of fun figuring out how to implement the Turbo Pascal 1-3 graphics API using inclined assembler to draw CGA graphics, and then my games worked (not very fun games to be honest; more fun to implement that API).

burnt-resistor|4 months ago

Neat. I have an original copy of Numerical Recipes in Pascal.

I used to have a copy of a Turbo Pascal graphics book with a blue-purple Porsche (not pg's hah) on the cover that included code for a raytracer. It would take about a minute to render one line at 320x200x256 colors, depending on the number of scene objects and light sources.

marstall|4 months ago

totally. so strange that that was the fastest, most flowy dev experience i've ever had. been chasing that ever since. though i must say rails, vite, react fast refresh, etc. are pretty nice in that regard.