1. The language was better for big apps (statically typed, more powerful, lots of features like proper exception handling). It supported proper multi-threading and better Win32 interop, which in practice you often needed for advanced effects in both Delphi and VB.
2. The documentation was excellent and always reachable from anywhere in the IDE. It was all local of course so if you wanted to know about something - a control, an API, a part of the UI, whatever - you just pointed at it and pressed f1. Help would appear immediately with low latency. It also came with a big pile of yellow and blue covered books that taught you everything you needed to know.
3. The UI was well optimized with things like tabbed editors before tabbing became popular. It was made up floating but dockable windows, sometimes this was annoying but other times it let you keep things on screen.
4. Very good support for database connectivity.
5. The ecosystem was more coherent. VB wasn't usable for many advanced tasks so VB devs relied heavily on components written in C++ (OCX controls). Delphi was more powerful so components were often written in Delphi itself, with all the attendant advantages.
6. "Components" were more powerful than ordinary libraries of the type you get today - you could install a component into the IDE and it'd appear in a components picker at the top. You could then immediately drag and drop them onto a "form" (window) and begin configuring it with an interactive property and event UI that was always present on the left. This worked even for components that were not UI components, for example, you could drag/drop a timer from the component library onto a form, see all the properties and configure them visually, and then double click on the event to be taken to an editor window with the event handler already written out for you.
7. There were lots of little quality of life things, like it came with some stock icons for buttons.
Last time I used Qt Designer was the KDE2 days, it's almost certainly better than Delphi by now.
Versus the way we do things today, some stuff was better and some is worse. Delphi was primarily a wrapper around Win32 so apps written in it weren't portable. Back then it didn't matter of course, Windows had a monopoly. That meant it inherited Windows' limitations - UIs weren't responsive, styling barely existed, typography was limited, and the deployment story was nonexistent. That's why you keep seeing references to how great it was that Delphi made statically linked EXEs; same reason people like Go today. Operating systems suck hard at deployment, one of the things that eventually pushed people towards the web. In the grand tradition of platform devs ignoring deployment entirely, Borland never fixed it even as the web ate their lunch along with Microsofts.
On the other hand, the components model was pretty nice. Being able to configure libraries using a simple auto-generated GUI made them often much easier to use.
> The ecosystem was more coherent. VB wasn't usable for many advanced tasks so VB devs relied heavily on components written in C++ (OCX controls)
Until VB 6, which introduced AOT compilation based on VC++ backend, and creation of OCX in VB itself.
To this day, one of the easiest way to do COM on Windows, even better than .NET Framework (.NET Core made it harder, yet another thing that Framework does better).
In version 6, you could chose what compilation model, classical (p-code) or the new AOT backend.
Compiling BASIC to machine code is how it was born after all, the interpreters came to be in 8 bit machines, due to their hardware constraints.
Besides, Microsoft already had similar experience with a dual compilation model in Quick BASIC.
And not to leave this being my opinion only,
"Microsoft Visual Basic allows you to compile your applications to fast, efficient native code, using the same optimizing back-end compiler technology as Microsoft Visual C++. Native code compilation provides several options for optimizing and debugging that aren't available with p-code. These options are traditionally called "switches," because each option can be turned on or off."
I always thought that the primary reason that native apps lost to the web was deployment, something that is so easy to fix and yet OS people are completely blind to it.
2. The documentation was excellent and always reachable from anywhere in the IDE. It was all local of course so if you wanted to know about something - a control, an API, a part of the UI, whatever - you just pointed at it and pressed f1. Help would appear immediately with low latency. It also came with a big pile of yellow and blue covered books that taught you everything you needed to know.
3. The UI was well optimized with things like tabbed editors before tabbing became popular. It was made up floating but dockable windows, sometimes this was annoying but other times it let you keep things on screen.
4. Very good support for database connectivity.
5. The ecosystem was more coherent. VB wasn't usable for many advanced tasks so VB devs relied heavily on components written in C++ (OCX controls). Delphi was more powerful so components were often written in Delphi itself, with all the attendant advantages.
6. "Components" were more powerful than ordinary libraries of the type you get today - you could install a component into the IDE and it'd appear in a components picker at the top. You could then immediately drag and drop them onto a "form" (window) and begin configuring it with an interactive property and event UI that was always present on the left. This worked even for components that were not UI components, for example, you could drag/drop a timer from the component library onto a form, see all the properties and configure them visually, and then double click on the event to be taken to an editor window with the event handler already written out for you.
7. There were lots of little quality of life things, like it came with some stock icons for buttons.
Last time I used Qt Designer was the KDE2 days, it's almost certainly better than Delphi by now.
Versus the way we do things today, some stuff was better and some is worse. Delphi was primarily a wrapper around Win32 so apps written in it weren't portable. Back then it didn't matter of course, Windows had a monopoly. That meant it inherited Windows' limitations - UIs weren't responsive, styling barely existed, typography was limited, and the deployment story was nonexistent. That's why you keep seeing references to how great it was that Delphi made statically linked EXEs; same reason people like Go today. Operating systems suck hard at deployment, one of the things that eventually pushed people towards the web. In the grand tradition of platform devs ignoring deployment entirely, Borland never fixed it even as the web ate their lunch along with Microsofts.
On the other hand, the components model was pretty nice. Being able to configure libraries using a simple auto-generated GUI made them often much easier to use.