Quote Originally Posted by phibermon View Post
I'm not sure how relevant it is to talk about the popularity of pascal in relation to other languages. If it's in terms of an open source project and attracting the largest number of users/devs as possible, then why choose Pascal anyway?
If you talk about Asphyre (remember, it's Asphyre thread), then the decision choosing Pascal (Delphi) was made almost 12 years ago.

If you meant why keeping the project written in Pascal? Because it is too large to be ported to other languages, which would involve enormous effort and there might be better alternatives already. For instance, if you would use C#, then XNA would be a place to start. Besides, with 64-bit platform provided by Delphi and FPC/Lazarus, Mac OS and iOS, there is no reason why would you have the need to switch to a different language/tool.

Asphyre itself, which was initially called PowerDraw, was started based on motivation from experience with DelphiX. First, it was a plugin for DelphiX to provide hardware acceleration for alpha-blending and rotation effects, but as DelphiX started to age with its outdated DirectX 7 support, Asphyre (PowerDraw) was rewritten to be a standalone package using DirectX 8 back in 2001. Indeed, the peak period of highest activity in Asphyre community are 2007 - 2009 years; you can see this by the number of posts around these times in our previous community forums.