[■] Object Pascal Is Cool

The sun is coming up over the server racks. Or maybe it’s just the glow of the error logs reflecting off my empty coffee mug. It’s hard to tell anymore.

Most of the industry is chasing the dragon. They want the shiny framework, the abstraction layer that abstracts the abstraction, the container that holds the container that holds the nothingness. It’s absurd. It’s Sisyphus pushing a YAML boulder up a hill of broken dependencies, only to watch it roll down every time a minor version updates.

I’m not Tyler Durden. I don’t want to blow up the data center. I’m Marla. I’m just trying to slide through this chaos without getting infected, finding the little warm spots of reality in a cold, dead architecture.

And that’s where Object Pascal comes in.

You think it’s dead? You think it’s a relic? You’re listening to the wrong people. You’re listening to the guys in suits who sell complexity by the hour.

Here is the truth, stripped down to the metal, on why Object Pascal (Free Pascal/Lazarus) is the only thing making sense at 4:00 AM.

1. The Compiler Doesn’t Lie to You

Modern languages are like a bad relationship. They promise you the world, they’re dynamic, they’re “flexible,” and then you run the script in production and it crashes because undefined is not a function. It’s a betrayal.

Object Pascal is a stiff drink. It’s strong typing. It tells you exactly what you messed up before you even try to run it.

  • Speed: It compiles fast. I mean, viscerally fast. While your Rust crate is still downloading half the internet, the Pascal compiler has already finished the binary and is asking for a light.
  • Clarity: Rob Pike says clear is better than clever. Pascal code reads like a sentence. begin, end. No curly braces hiding in the shadows to trip you up.

2. The Single Binary Salvation

In DevOps, dependency hell is the devil’s playground. You deploy a Python script to a node, and suddenly you need the interpreter, the virtual env, the pip install, the correct headers, and prayers to the old gods.

With Free Pascal (FPC), you get a single, static binary.

You scp that file to the server. You run it. It works. It’s like a grand piano falling out of a window—it hits hard, it makes a noise, and there’s no arguing with it.

“Complexity is the enemy. It is the thing that keeps you from understanding your system.” — Rob Pike (paraphrased through a haze of smoke)

Pascal gives you a 2MB executable that doesn’t need a Docker container to feel safe.

3. Cross-Platform without the Drama

You write the tool on your Mac. You recompile it for Linux. You recompile it for Windows. It’s the same code. It just works.

Lazarus (the IDE) is ugly, sure. It looks like a Soviet apartment block from the 1980s. But it functions. It builds UIs and CLI tools that run anywhere. It doesn’t care about your feelings; it cares about the CPU instructions. It respects the road, just like Kerouac. It moves.

4. It Was Doing “Go” Before Go

Rob Pike built Go to be simple, fast, and statically typed. He wanted to get away from the C++ mess. Guess what? Object Pascal was already there in the 90s.

  • Interfaces: It has them.
  • Generics: It has them now.
  • Modules (Units): It invented the modularity game.

It’s the old boxer at the bar who looks washed up but can still knock you out with one punch because he knows exactly where the jaw is.

A Taste of the Metal

Here is a tool. No npm modules. No imports from the ether. Just a simple program to check if a service port is listening, because telnet is missing from your distroless container.

program PortCheck;

{$mode objfpc}{$H+}

uses
  SysUtils, Sockets;

var
  Sock: LongInt;
  Addr: TInetSockAddr;
  TargetHost: String;
  TargetPort: Word;

begin
  if ParamCount < 2 then
  begin
    WriteLn('Usage: portcheck <host> <port>');
    Halt(1);
  end;

  TargetHost := ParamStr(1);
  TargetPort := StrToIntDef(ParamStr(2), 80);

  Sock := fpSocket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
  if Sock = -1 then
  begin
    WriteLn('Error: Could not create socket.');
    Halt(1);
  end;

  Addr.sin_family := AF_INET;
  Addr.sin_port := htons(TargetPort);
  Addr.sin_addr.s_addr := NetAddr ToHostAddr(TargetHost).s_addr; // Simplified for example

  Write('Connecting to ', TargetHost, ':', TargetPort, '... ');

  if fpConnect(Sock, @Addr, SizeOf(Addr)) = 0 then
    WriteLn('SUCCESS. The beast is alive.')
  else
    WriteLn('FAILURE. Silence on the line.');

  fpClose(Sock);
end.

The Absurdity of the Stack

We build these towers of Babel. Kubernetes, Helm, Istio. We add layers to hide the fact that we’re just moving bits from A to B.

Using Object Pascal in 2026 is an act of quiet rebellion. It’s saying, “I don’t need the hype. I need to parse this log file, transform this JSON, and restart this service, and I need it to happen in 10 milliseconds, 50,000 times a day.”

It’s human. It respects your time. It doesn’t ask you to learn a new paradigm every six months. It just sits there, reliable as a heartache, waiting for you to type program MyTool;.

So, put down the JavaScript framework of the week. Pour yourself something cheap. Write a Pascal program. Watch it compile instantly. Feel the cold, hard reality of the machine.

It’s beautiful. In a dirty kind of way.