It's really a pity how badly the Delphi product was managed by Borland/Embarcadero.
Object Pascal is a great language. These days it produces native code for pretty much all platforms out there. The binaries created are tiny, and the speed is high - close to what C will give you - meaning that typically the code will run between 100 to 10000 times faster than comparable Python code.
When it comes to Castle Engine, it's a gigantic project, making it extremely easy to create games and 3D applications in a RAD kind of way. And unlike other huge Pascal frameworks, it's not a legacy product, but very actively developed. I have HUGE respect for the developers.
A comparable gigantic impressive project is Mormot, and ORM/SOA/MVC framework which is based on extremely optimized code.
Building a Server application with Object Pascal and Mormot is easy to do, and where using NodeJS might be able to handle 500 requests per second, with pascal code you will be in the areas of 10000+.
And this means that while with other languages you might need to run dozens of servers to handle the load, your Object Pascal based server code instead would easily run on a single server. So, using that language can give you massive cost savings.
A lot of people only remember Object Pascal as a teaching language. But the language has evolved, and still has features other languages are lacking, most importantly RTTI (aka reflection). There is only one area where the language isn't up to date, and that is having Multithreading/coroutines integrated into the language itself like it's done in Go.
And finally: I can still compile and run code I have written 40 (!) years ago. Within those 40 years tons of languages have come and gone out of fashion. Pascal is still here.
Back to Castle Engine: Even if you are not familiar with the Object Pascal language, I can highly recommend to try out their visual editor. It's just amazing.
Object Pascal is a great language. These days it produces native code for pretty much all platforms out there. The binaries created are tiny, and the speed is high - close to what C will give you - meaning that typically the code will run between 100 to 10000 times faster than comparable Python code.
When it comes to Castle Engine, it's a gigantic project, making it extremely easy to create games and 3D applications in a RAD kind of way. And unlike other huge Pascal frameworks, it's not a legacy product, but very actively developed. I have HUGE respect for the developers.
A comparable gigantic impressive project is Mormot, and ORM/SOA/MVC framework which is based on extremely optimized code.
Building a Server application with Object Pascal and Mormot is easy to do, and where using NodeJS might be able to handle 500 requests per second, with pascal code you will be in the areas of 10000+.
And this means that while with other languages you might need to run dozens of servers to handle the load, your Object Pascal based server code instead would easily run on a single server. So, using that language can give you massive cost savings.
A lot of people only remember Object Pascal as a teaching language. But the language has evolved, and still has features other languages are lacking, most importantly RTTI (aka reflection). There is only one area where the language isn't up to date, and that is having Multithreading/coroutines integrated into the language itself like it's done in Go.
And finally: I can still compile and run code I have written 40 (!) years ago. Within those 40 years tons of languages have come and gone out of fashion. Pascal is still here.
Back to Castle Engine: Even if you are not familiar with the Object Pascal language, I can highly recommend to try out their visual editor. It's just amazing.