> That's reasonable to not believe me, but can you enlighten me with more samples? If you mean managing pointers in Pascal, you can code in a style of high-level language like JS and never see a pointer to manage, thanks to managed records, objects, strings, and arrays.
Exactly.
When I hear "safety" I think of what guarantees the language is able to give me and how. As an example, if I don't import "unsafe" in Go, pure Go code is guaranteed to be "memory safe" except for concurrency hazards. In general, this means that pure, safe Go code cannot ever trigger a use-after-free, double free, out-of-bounds memory access, etc. Of course, this doesn't prevent bugs, but the guarantees provided do prevent certain classes of security issues entirely. Bugs that trigger Go panics are almost never exploitable, whereas bugs that trigger segfaults often are.
With Go, it's possible to disallow unsafe code entirely, because the safe subset of the language includes almost the whole thing. The only real escape hatch is the unsafe package.
Rust is similar, but instead of unsafe as a package, it has unsafe blocks. And instead of still allowing concurrency errors, Rust enforces memory ownership tracking via referential lifetime checking. Lifetime checking still applies even when using unsafe blocks. Lifetime checks prevent bugs like double free, use-after-free and more, but they also prevent concurrency errors by entirely disallowing multiple mutable references to exist to the same data, as well as disallowing a mutable and non-mutable reference to the same data simultaneously. The only way I'm aware of to crash safe Rust code outside of panics is by causing a stack overflow, but this condition is not exploitable. Thus Rust has one of the most impressive definitions of a "safe subset" that I'm aware of. The only way you can really do better is probably using theorem provers to prove correctness, or maybe you could make bounds checking a bit more runtime-efficient using a SAT solver to disprove possible out of bounds errors.
As far as example code goes, I think it's moot. The point is that FreePascal doesn't really have an explicitly safe subset. As you are describing, it is possible to use FreePascal safely. In fact, it's easier to do so than many other languages. I hear you. However, that having been said, technically, most languages have a "safe" subset of operations that can not have any runtime hazards. FPC's safe subset is probably bigger and more useful than C's, but it isn't explicitly defined like Go or Rust. That alone puts it in a different class. Having safe subsets be well-defined allows you to net hard guarantees by enabling one to enforce the use of only safe subsets. It allows you to turn "probably never" into "absolutely never, ever." (Until you get hit by a hardware bug like rowhammer or a faulty CPU... But, you know.)
> I stand by what I said about speed: I've been comparing the resulting code of GCC or Clang and FPC for years, and if you know what you're doing, the resulting speed will be almost the same.
I mean, if you write good Go code, it will also optimize very nicely. The FPC optimizer is no slouch: it has all of the basic optimizer passes you could hope for. It's documented as such. It's probably a good compile time trade-off. But the documentation reveals it does indeed lack certain advanced passes like auto vectorization, and I'd find it surprising if the optimization passes were as sophisticated as LLVM/GCC.
Despite that Go is similar with regards to optimizer passes, nobody would consider Go particularly slow. In fact, it is considered to be very fast.
I do understand that you are telling the truth. I have no doubt you did compare GCC and LLVM to FPC and found that it is often similar in performance. That's generally true among a lot of languages for most code. Of course, there will be code where GCC/LLVM will do inscrutable things that less complex optimizers are definitely not going to do. Does it matter? I mean, it depends. Sometimes it matters. I believe that it is most likely going to matter in particularly complex and large software like web browsers, not the type of stuff most people are doing.
Anyway, I think Lazarus is still a great sell. Delphi always had one of the better UI libraries back in the day, and today, having a decent UI library at all is honestly quite a chore. Therefore the LCL alone has become quite a selling point. It's so bad that there is in fact Go bindings to the LCL, because Go and Rust lack decent, mature GUI options.
People definitely undersell Object Pascal and FPC because Pascal is old and weird looking. I feel the plight.