Hang On! Did you say iOS ?!

Absolutely! This was the big surprise of the event. Not only do we get Win32, Win64 and OSX in this release but also iOS!!

The iOS support isn’t yet in as finished state as the OSX support, but it is more than good enough to be usable imho, and improvements to this are high on the list, being expected in the first update pack or not long there-after.

To be clear, the shortcomings are not in the compiler technology but in the integration with the debugger – at the moment you can compile, run and test/debug your iOS app as a Win32 app in the IDE, but if you want to test and debug on the iPhone/iPad simulator itself (or deploy to an actual device) then you have to compile the project in xcode on an actual Mac. I am not entirely clear on how this works, but suffice to say there is no translation to Objective-C going on – the xcode compiler takes the ObjectPascal from Delphi, compiles it and then allows you to run and debug that ObjectPascal source in the xcode environment itself.

Also, just as with OSX, the iOS support builds on the FireMonkey framework. This means that – with a little care – you can write an iPhone app today (100% native and thus entirely welcome in the Apple Store – no if’s or but’s) and when the Android compiler support is delivered simply recompile for Android!!