>>19
It's just everything that's good about, say, C# .NET (safe language, awesome visual GUI designer, easy as fuck, hides Win32 cancer), without all the bullshit (no .NET, generates real native code, you can use pointers and inline asm, interaction with other native stuff is completely seamless, and it lets you go down all you want if you desire (for example process window messages manually, so you can override WM_PAINT on any component and draw it yourself, and this takes a single declaration without messing with the message loop - not sure how this is done in .NET but I guess at the very least it's forcefully very abstracted, if it even uses native controls at all)), a better IDE (I don't know which one is more powerful, but Delphi's sure feels a lot more pleasurable to me - also it's written in Delphi itself), and a compiler so fast that it really makes you wonder what the fuck went wrong when using anything else except maybe tcc. Retro-compatibility between releases it also godlike, I used some code from 1995 and it worked with zero warnings (it was far from trivial code too, I was scared until I tried).
In short, is extremely powerful, very easy and working with it is orgasmic, and it doesn't fuck neither the developer nor the user forcing them to install inane runtime/framework bullshite.
200KB might seem a lot for you, in that case you can optionally install a shared DLL (which is around 5MB IIRC) and then you can link to it to shrink your programs/DLLs to ~4K when empty (and still have the awesome library).
It's a shame it's not in the best state nowadays, but it's still used for plenty of very popular applications (from the top of my head Skype, Teamspeak and Spybot-S&D are sure written in it - not the kind of apps
/prog/ would like but then again
/prog/ wouldn't like most .NET apps either).
PS.: In case you didn't know MS hired the lead language designer which then went on to design C#. They also hired other key people, most of which have left MS already.