Danny Thorpe has a blog. Definitely worth subscribing to: Borland has a great tradition of out-innovating Microsoft in software development tools. The joke used to be that you bought Borland in even-numbered years and Microsoft in odd-numbered. The market could definitely use that kind of competition again. The first example? Because the Delphi for .NET language was implemented using 100% managed typesafe code, they can seamlessly move between .NET 1.1 (32-bit), .NET 2.0 32-bit (Whidbey), and .NET 2.0 64-bit (Whidbey / AMD / Itanium). I haven't tested Itanium code, but code compiled for AMD's x86-64 extensions averages about 20% faster than equivalent 32-bit code -- a nice little bump which Delphi will give you for free. Nice. Very nice.