Delphi 13 Community Edition Now Free for Students, Hobbyists, and Small Teams
Delphi 13 Community Edition Is Now Available
Embarcadero has released Delphi 13 Community Edition, the latest free version of its professional development environment. Based on Delphi 13 Florence, it brings the Community Edition up to date from 12.1, adding language features like a ternary operator and NameOf, a new 64-bit IDE, and improved FireMonkey and VCL frameworks. Mobile support now includes Android 15 and iOS 18. The free license is available to students, hobbyists, freelancers earning under $5,000 per year, and small startups.
Delphi 13 Community Edition is based on Delphi 13 Florence and brings the Community Edition forward from version 12.1.
- SalaevAl
Can't believe Delphi is still actively maintained — and with features like this. Lost track of it years ago. Back in 2003 I wrote a university coursework in it; Pascal was my second language after BASIC. Might be time to take another look, especially with the multi-platform support.
- kitd
No Linux support is a shame. Fortunately there's Lazarus and FreePascal as an alternative.
- kqr
A lot of the software I really admired in the early 2000s was developed by single persons using Delphi. It seems to me like there is (was?) something promoted by a Delphi environment that is rare to find elsewhere, that lets people (a) quickly prototype cool stuff, and then (b) sustainably grow it into a mature product as it gains users. I wish I cared enough to learn it, but there's so much else I need to learn first!
- aktau
My favourite Delphi program, and the one I learned to program with, was Dev-C++ (https://sourceforge.net/projects/dev-cpp). AFAIK there is a more recent fork, but I also clearly recall the 4.9.9.? versoin number from back then. It was very fast (including startup). I enjoyed it a lot back when I was still on Windows. Funny that Delphi was used to create a C/C++ IDE.
- cautiouscat
I gave Delphi a shot, but after setting up my account I got a few phone calls a few days later about it to sell me on it. I was genuinely surprised companies still did that in 2024/2025.
- albertzeyer
Why would anyone use that over Lazarus (https://www.lazarus-ide.org/)?
- giancarlostoro
Last time I tried Delphi Community Edition, I had to give them my email just to download it, then when I tried any of the templates the IDE showed, it wouldn't build at all, don't show me a template if it doesn't work.
I received an email from someone asking how I was liking Delphi, I naively responded with my issue, but quickly realized he was just trying to sell Delphi. I would have bought Delphi over the years if they had a personal license for $99 or something, I am not investing thousands of dollars on a software where the free trial blows up out of the box (not intentionally it seemed).
- alexaholic
I haven't heard of Delphi in ages. Where I grew up, I was the first generation to start high school with C++ as opposed to the previous ones who were stuck with Pascal. I believe I did some in university, but not much. Anyway, I am amused to find this news on HN. I spent some of the past 24 hours reading through — and trying to draw some conclusions out of — the Go vs Rust sword fights in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49261133 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47222270 Mad respect for these guys not giving a funk.