# International Pascal Congress - my presentation slides, various (positive) thoughts about Pascal (both FPC and Delphi) bright future, and why you should use Pascal
**URL:** https://forum.castle-engine.io/t/international-pascal-congress-my-presentation-slides-various-positive-thoughts-about-pascal-both-fpc-and-delphi-bright-future-and-why-you-should-use-pascal/854
**Category:** News
**Created:** [July 8, 2023, 10:48pm UTC](https://forum.castle-engine.io/t/international-pascal-congress-my-presentation-slides-various-positive-thoughts-about-pascal-both-fpc-and-delphi-bright-future-and-why-you-should-use-pascal/854 "2023-07-08T22:48:44Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@michalis](https://forum.castle-engine.io/u/michalis)
#### Post date: [July 8, 2023, 10:48pm UTC](https://forum.castle-engine.io/t/international-pascal-congress-my-presentation-slides-various-positive-thoughts-about-pascal-both-fpc-and-delphi-bright-future-and-why-you-should-use-pascal/854/1 "2023-07-08T22:48:44Z")
| [](https://castle-engine.io/wp/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/salamanca-photo-michalis.png "Salamanca photo from Michalis - Convent of San Esteban") |
The [International Pascal Congress](http://pascalcongress.com/) has finished and I’m packing home.
This was intensive _and_ very positive experience.
My stuff:
- I had a workshop about _Castle Game Engine_ (4 days, 1 hour per day) and a talk about graphics and game engines in Pascal. I got a lot of positive feedback about both the talk and the workshop and the engine 🙂 I’m coming back confident we have a great thing on our hands. (And we have to finally release engine version 7.0 and spread the word about it as wide as possible!)
- [The slides from my presentation on Castle Game Engine at IPC 2023 are linked from here](https://castle-engine.io/ipc2023/). The talk wasn’t easy to prepare (I wanted to cover a lot of things) but it seems it went really good. I went from a general description of modern GPUs and their APIs, through overview of various Pascal libraries and game engines for graphics, and ended with overview of things I consider important when making/choosing game engine.
- The above link [Castle Game Engine at IPC 2023](https://castle-engine.io/ipc2023/) also leads to notes from my CGE workshop and a bit silly (created during the workshop, with everyone watching) [demo application](https://github.com/michaliskambi/salamanca2/).
In a broader context, about Pascal, and Delphi and FPC, this was invigorating as well. I met really great people, using both FPC and Delphi (really a mixed bunch, some people preferred Delphi some FPC/Lazarus, many were using both, like me).
- Including [Marco Cantu](https://www.marcocantu.com/), Delphi project manager. A heard a few presentations of language features (some specific to Delphi), and overall I am impressed by the direction Delphi is taking. Modern language (e.g. I was surprised by the power of inline variables and certain type inference involved, and I have to say I’m a fan now). Tools to build modern applications (RAD server). Looking at the landscape of other languages and integrating (FMX for Python devs).
- We also had a presentation about the upcoming [Fresnel from Lazarus](https://foundation.freepascal.org/roadmap-for-lazarus-and-fpc), and what it really means (CSS, Skia in FPC too), by _Mattias Gaertner_ and _Detlef Overbeek_. This nicely connected with other talks about how important is the web target for everyone now — it was a prominent topic, along with [pas2js](https://wiki.freepascal.org/pas2js), in the [Bruno Fierens from TMS Software](https://tmssoftware.com/) presentation. This is an exciting time — finally we think about a new approach to design visual applications, not only extending a dated VCL design. (Don’t get me wrong, LCL is nice, we’ve come a long way since VCL. But LCL inheritance from VCL is visible and causing issues — like the “absolute” layout by default, integer coordinates etc. Unlike web applications using CSS that can support both desktop and mobile with drastically different aspect ratios and physical sizes.)
Overall, I come back even more confident about some CGE decisions I was thinking about:
- Web target is super important. [I already wrote about our plans for web target here](https://castle-engine.io/wp/2023/04/08/web-target-progress-and-plans/).
- I absolutely want perfect support for both FPC and Delphi. I want to support both, and I want to support both equally well. They both go in good directions now. Some changes will be compatible, some incompatible between Delphi and FPC, but I don’t mind — let’s show the world that Pascal is a modern language, let users choose compiler they like, and as long as the core language stays compatible — I don’t mind a little incompatible libraries around. We’re in for interesting times.
- I was thinking about exposing CGE to Python developers at some point in the future. I was happy to learn this matches some Embarcadero ideas too. See [DelphiFMX4Python: Python GUI module powered by Delphi’s FireMonkey framework. Supporting Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Android GUI development](https://github.com/embarcadero/DelphiFMX4Python). And see [python4delphi: Free components that wrap up Python into Delphi and Lazarus (FPC)](https://github.com/pyscripter/python4delphi). And during talks, Marco (I believe correctly) pointed out that Python is enticingly close to Pascal in terms of thinking about _“clean and readable programming language syntax”_. Except they miss strong typing! My idea about attracting Python developers to CGE is therefore consistent.
Overall, I have a ton of notes, and a ton of new enthusiasm for both our engine, and Pascal in general.
In related notes, [I just added a page “why Pascal” to our documentation](https://castle-engine.io/why_pascal) — this is understandably a question we often get, and I want that page to be a good answer.
Have fun everyone! Back to packing now 🙂
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### Author:  [@edj](https://forum.castle-engine.io/u/edj)
#### Post date: [July 9, 2023, 2:53pm UTC](https://forum.castle-engine.io/t/international-pascal-congress-my-presentation-slides-various-positive-thoughts-about-pascal-both-fpc-and-delphi-bright-future-and-why-you-should-use-pascal/854/2 "2023-07-09T14:53:35Z")
Was there good attendance? I really wanted to go to this.
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### Author:  [@michalis](https://forum.castle-engine.io/u/michalis)
#### Post date: [July 9, 2023, 6:00pm UTC](https://forum.castle-engine.io/t/international-pascal-congress-my-presentation-slides-various-positive-thoughts-about-pascal-both-fpc-and-delphi-bright-future-and-why-you-should-use-pascal/854/3 "2023-07-09T18:00:52Z")
I do not have exact stats, and “good attendance” depends on what one wants 🙂
That said, I think we’ve had like 30+ people listening to plenary talks. For workshops it was smaller, esp. as we had 2 parallel tracks, so in case of CGE people had to choose whether to go to CGE workshop or workshop about cloud solutions in Delphi. Both were good workshops :), so people mostly divided / 2.
That’s not bad (I’ve been on smaller conferences, on Pascal and non-Pascal topics), but not amazing either, surely everyone wanted more people. It was a 1st edition – next one is already planned in 2026. I hope the event will be repeated and grow in popularity, this was really fruitful.