Writing Turbo Pascal in 2025

Turbo Pascal 7.0 still compiles in under a second on a 486. On DOSBox-X running on modern hardware, it’s instantaneous. The IDE — blue background, yellow text, pull-down menus — is the direct ancestor of the Turbo Vision library that inspired this site’s theme.

I wrote a small unit that reads the RTC via INT 1Ah and formats it as ISO 8601. The entire program, compiled, is 3,248 bytes. Try getting that from a modern toolchain.

What surprised me was not just speed, but focus. Turbo Pascal’s workflow is so tight that experimentation becomes natural: edit, compile, run, inspect, repeat. No dependency resolver, no plugin lifecycle, no hidden build graph. You can reason about the whole stack while staying in flow.

Why it is still worth touching

Turbo Pascal is a useful training environment for software fundamentals:

strong type habits without heavyweight ceremony
predictable binaries and memory-aware design
immediate feedback loops that reward small iterations
clear separation between source, build, and runtime artifacts

Those habits transfer directly to modern systems programming even if the language itself is no longer mainstream.

Practical 2025 setup

I run TP7 in DOSBox-X with a mapped workspace and a reproducible startup script. Projects stay in plain directories with text docs and make-like helper batch files. This gives me old-school ergonomics with modern backup safety. For tiny utilities, the result is still excellent: compact binaries, quick startup, and almost zero tool friction.