Delphi XE4 is out, supporting Windows, OS X and iOS!

[marcov]

I don't know why they didn't carry on using FPC, for some bizarre reason they've chosen one open source compiler chain (LLVM) over another (FPC) using open source as a justification for doing so.

Afaik they never planned too. FPC is GPL based, so any enhancement would have had to be donated back (*). I assume they originally used FPC mostly to speed development by developing their libs with FPC in parallel with their compiler work, but then their compiler development was slower than planned they couldn't release it. Because they made promises, they had to release something, so they released it FPC based.

FPC got a lot of flak for that (not supporting the language features of XE2), but we never a part of that decision, and Embarcadero never did any work on it themselves (or never released it)

I assume the current XE4 language limitations are just to test the water how resistant the user base is against (Java/C# imitation) change. They want the language to get a more modern face in the hope they attract new (not delphi originating) users, that demand a form of GC no matter what.

IOW I think those language incompatibilities are deliberately done, and not because of LLVM or other technical reasons.

(*) Note that there was not one single line donated back to FPC from XE2! They probably got out of their way to avoid this, though I attribute that more to lawyer paranoia than malice.