Editing Virtual Pascal (section)

===Microsoft Windows, OS/2===
The compiler was quite popular in the [[Bulletin board system]] (BBS) scene, probably because of its OS/2 port and being one of the few affordable multi-target compilers. Also [[Turbo Pascal]] had been popular in the BBS scene too, but its successor, [[Delphi (programming language)|Delphi]] was suddenly for Windows only. Virtual Pascal provided a migration path for existing codebases.

There has been pressure from some users to license Virtual Pascal as [[open-source software]]. This has not been done, for these reasons:
* The compiler [[source code]] is mostly written in [[x86 assembly language]] which is hard to change and maintain.
* Part of the [[run-time library]] is proprietary to [[Borland]] (The Free Pascal run-time library was ported to VirtualPascal by Noah Silva, however newer versions of the Free Pascal RTL use features of the Free Pascal compiler which are unsupported by VirtualPascal, and so cannot be ported). 
* The patch/diff tool to work around the above (provide changes to proprietary without distributing parts of the original) was proprietary and (Windows) 16-bit only.
* Documentation and help are maintained with expensive (and sometimes no longer available) proprietary tools
* There is nobody who fully understands the code. Allan said that some of the deeper areas were no-touch for him (original code by Vitaly)

Although it had a wide user base in the late 1990s, VP has not evolved significantly since 2001, and after a few maintenance-only releases, the owner declared that development had ceased in 2005.<ref name=vpdeath/>

On 4&nbsp;Apr 2005, Virtual Pascal was announced 'dead' on the official site. The last released version (2.1 Build&nbsp;279) was announced on 13&nbsp;May 2004.<ref name=vpdeath/>