The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Delphi’ Category

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Delphi sorcery: Introducing Spring.Benchmark – a port of Google benchmark

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/14

On my list of tools to experiment with: [Wayback/Archive] Delphi sorcery: Introducing Spring.Benchmark – a port of Google benchmark

This got released while I was recovering from cancer procedures, to I totally missed it.

Interesting stuff, as I knew there was the Google benchmark library*, but since I hardly do any C++ work, I never used it.

* [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – google/benchmark: A microbenchmark support library

The source code for the Delphi based Spring.Benchmark library is at [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – spring4d/benchmark: Delphi port of Google Benchmark, especially [Wayback/Archive] benchmark/Spring.Benchmark.pas at master · spring4d/benchmark · GitHub.

Videos to watch before using it:

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Posted in C++, Delphi, Development, Profiling-Performance-Measurement, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi Discord servers

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/09

Besides the Delphi Praxis servers (the [Wayback/Archive] German one has existed for what seems eternity, the [Wayback/Archive] English one took over the Google Plus Delphi group – see Google is sunsetting Google+ by August 2019; DelphiPraxis might start English forums and have RSS – and de-facto the dead Embarcadero forums as the old newsgroup servers went dead, and the new ones weren’t known for their high up-time [Wayback/Archive] community.embarcadero.com’s forums – General Help – Delphi-PRAXiS [en]), nowadays – with the shortened attention span of many people – Discord has a few Delphi servers as well:

They are chat based, and suffer from messages and threads disappearing, just like the Delphi newsgroups and forums suffered from, and archiving content can be difficult or impossible (not just because of the Wayback Machine being down).

Queries:

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Posted in Chat, Delphi, Development, Discord, SocialMedia, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Old programming books had cool little “puns” in their references, modern lack them in their indices. On the why, and history of them.

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/01/01

I wrote a two earlier blog posts around puns in programming book indices before:

  1. the 1992 Turbo Pascal 7.0 Language Guide having both entry in the manual about Recursion (“recursive loop, see recursive loop”) which of course is similar to “infinite loop” and entries for “infinite loop See loop, infinite” and “loop, infinite See infinite loop”.
  2. infinite loop in “LaTeX: A Document Preparation System” by Leslie Lamport, printed in 1994.

In the last one, I promised to list more occurrences which I now finally had time for to do.

But let me first elaborate more on the observation that modern computer books (like for instance on C# and Delphi beyond version 1) lack these kinds of index pun.

On the Delphi side, the index entry joke for recursion got removed no later than Delphi 3 (I am still looking for a Delphi 2 version of the Object Pascal Language Guide, see further below) even before the book being fully redone electronically and the index pages generation being automated in

I think I even understand why that is: the process of creating of indices. By the start of this century, more and more indices were automatically being generated and for the last 2 decades or so, all of them are. Back in the days however, indices were mostly done by hand. Nowadays, with everything automated, it is actually pretty tricky in most environments to add such an “infinite loop” index entry like in the Turbo Pascal book, as it would require two things at once:

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Posted in .NET, C, C#, C++, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 1, Delphi 2, Development, EKON, Event, History, LaTeX, LifeHacker, LISP, Mathematics, Pascal, Perl, PL/I (a.k.a. PL/1), Power User, science, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Typesetting | Tagged: , | 4 Comments »

“Incompatible parameter lists” when using Types.T*DynArray? – VCL – Delphi-PRAXiS [en]

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/12/24

Reminder to self: Delphi 11.3 (Alexandria update 3), mid-product added a compiler changing kind of deprecating using types of this form (including ones defined in the System, System.Types and other RTL/VCL units):

Overview of “deprecated” * and alternative array types
“deprecated” alternative: write it all out
TBooleanDynArray TArray<Boolean>
TByteDynArray TArray<Byte>
TCardinalDynArray TArray<Cardinal>
TStringDynArray TArray<string>
  • technically not deprecated, as deprecated is a hinting directive and despite these having existed for almost 25 years now**, hinting directives like platform, deprecated, or library cannot be used on array types:a bug has been filed for this in 2017 but still has not been addressed, see my earlier blog post Delphi Declarations and Statements: Hinting Directives.

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Posted in Delphi, Delphi 11.0 Alexandria (Olympus), Development, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

If you sunset things, at least remove references: Finding information (IDE Tutorial) – RAD Studio

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/10/30

The sad thing about sunsetting useful resources is that usually a proper cleanup is not being performaned.

Take for instance QC: it died 7 years ago (Embarcadero QualityCentral is dead; man-decades of customer work down the drain) and is still mentioned in dozens of places including this prominent one: [Wayback/Archive] Finding information (IDE Tutorial) – RAD Studio.

This is just an example from a product I still love, so I know what is lost, but plenty of other companies forget they are the custodians of their own sites and leaving things rotting makes for a bad feeling of their overall behaviour.

It’s not hard to be not sloppy. Here are some 20+ more links to fix: [Wayback/Archive] “qc.embarcadero.com” site:embarcadero.com – Google Search

Note the next will be CodeCentral, which was annouced to get sunset 5 years ago:

People want to save this (see for instance [Wayback/Archive] EMBT: Code Central is going away – Tips / Blogs / Tutorials / Videos – Delphi-PRAXiS [en]), but regrettably companies aren’t going to do themselves it despite they owe it to their customers and their legacy.

--jeroen

Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Event, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

string – Check if MyString[1] is an alphabetical character? – Stack Overflow (and how Embarcadero broke one of the product version neutral redirects)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/09/24

Quite a while ago [Wayback/Archive] string – Check if MyString[1] is an alphabetical character? – Stack Overflow asked by [Wayback/Archive] User Jeff was answered by [Wayback/Archive] Andreas Rejbrand:

The simplest approach is

function GetAlphaSubstr(const Str: string): string;
const
  ALPHA_CHARS = ['a'..'z', 'A'..'Z'];
var
  ActualLength: integer;
  i: Integer;
begin
  SetLength(result, length(Str));
  ActualLength := 0;
  for i := 1 to length(Str) do
    if Str[i] in ALPHA_CHARS then
    begin
      inc(ActualLength);
      result[ActualLength] := Str[i];
    end;
  SetLength(Result, ActualLength);
end;

but this will only consider English letters as “alphabetical characters”. It will not even consider the extremely important Swedish letters Å, Ä, and Ö as “alphabetical characters”!

Slightly more sophisticated is

function GetAlphaSubstr2(const Str: string): string;
var
  ActualLength: integer;
  i: Integer;
begin
  SetLength(result, length(Str));
  ActualLength := 0;
  for i := 1 to length(Str) do
    if Character.IsLetter(Str[i]) then
    begin
      inc(ActualLength);
      result[ActualLength] := Str[i];
    end;
  SetLength(Result, ActualLength);
end;

Back in 2011 I added a comment that for more than a decade would redirect to the most current documentation on the IsLetter method:

+1 for using IsLetter which checks the Unicode definition for being a letter or not [Wayback] docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter

Back then, Delphi X2 was current, so it would redirect

  1. from [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter
  2. to [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/XE2/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter
  3. then to [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/VCL/XE2/en/Character.TCharacter.IsLetter
  4. ending at [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/XE2/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter

After a long outage in 2022 (see The Delphi documentation site docwiki.embarcadero.com has been down/up oscillating for 4 days is now down for almost a day.) only the Alexandria help was restored.

This killed the above redirect.

Luckily [Wayback/Archive] George Birbilis noticed that and commented this:

@JeroenWiertPluimers the correct link now is: docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Alexandria/en/…

In order to refer to the most recent Delphi version, now you have to use [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter.

This redirects:

  1. via [Wayback] http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Alexandria/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter to
  2. to [Wayback] https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Alexandria/en/System.Character.TCharacter.IsLetter

The above breaks the help integration from older Delphi products which is bad. It is also bad because it makes it harder to port legacy Delphi code to more modern Delphi versions.

Hopefully the above gives you a bit insight how the docwiki help system was designed and what is left of that design.

–jeroen

Posted in Communications Development, Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Development, Encryption, Event, HTML, HTTP, https, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet protocol suite, Power User, Security, Software Development, TCP, TLS, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Interesting thread on the usefulness of running a syslog server and being able to write to it

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/07/04

For my link archive:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] jilles.com 🔜 MCH2022 🏳️‍🌈 on Twitter: “My Ubiquity setup stopped working (again). This happens way to often in my opinion. I have setup a monitoring environment to debug the issues and consider it not reliable enough for the amount of money I spend on it.”

  2. [Wayback/Archive] Rick on Twitter: “@jilles_com Waar heb je problemen mee? En ik tijdelijk een syslog server draaien. Dan je kun je gemakkelijker de logs doorspitten (kiwi heeft een simpele gratis versie)”
  3. [Wayback/Archive] jilles.com on Twitter: “@RickvanSoest Ik draai een grafana setup met syslog, snmp ingest en een losse traceroute om uit te sluiten of het aan de provider of de hardware ligt.”
  4. [Wayback/Archive] jilles.com on Twitter: “@RickvanSoest Software upgrades die falen. In dit geval een PoE switch die op z’n gat lag. In dit geval iets dat met een reboot gefixt is. Maar in geval van de upgrade was het een compleet nieuwe configuratie.”

In todays cross-platform world, it pays if your tooling can send logging to syslog.

Though originating from the CP/M and SunOS background, I have done most of my professional development work in Windows back-ends and front-ends, so here are some links relevant to that:

--jeroen

Posted in .NET, C#, Delphi, Development, DVCS - Distributed Version Control, git, Software Development, Source Code Management, Subversion/SVN | 2 Comments »

GitHub – KirillOsenkov/LargeAddressAware: A build tools package that adds support for making 32-bit exes LARGEADDRESSAWARE (and some words on a 64-bit Delphi product)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/06/26

[Wayback/Archive] GitHub – KirillOsenkov/LargeAddressAware: A build tools package that adds support for making 32-bit exes LARGEADDRESSAWARE

Hopefully this can be applied to Delphi projects as well. If not then in Delphi you can manually call this in an post-build task.

Addition late 20240626

[Wayback/Archive] Kirill Osenkov: “@wiert I also found that you can…” – Mastodon

@wiert I also found that you can target AnyCPU 32-bit preferred and it will give you the same address space. So that tool is only for x86.

Via [Wayback/Archive] Meik Tranel on X: “Please for the love of all that is holy. Do not build #dotnet tools to serve a non interactive task that is supposed to be run during a build – use an #MSBuild task package. Also #JS/#NPM devs should not be allowed to write tooling. Thanks for coming to my ted talk…”.

The Delphi bit inspired a few months ago by: [Wayback/Archive] Andreas on X: “Will there ever be a 64bit Delphi IDE or at least a LargeAddressAware version. Our Projekt crashes the IDE between 14-18 compilations because it runs out of memory. Maybe I have to patch the IDE myself by moving all .NET and Compiler memory allocations above the 2 GB address.”

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Posted in .NET, Conference Topics, Conferences, Continuous Integration, Delphi, Development, Event, msbuild, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Delphi has had a more type safe FreeAndNil or a while now, but in order to do so it lies to you

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/06/26

During my year+ of cancer treatments, Embarcadero did a tiny thing that makes [Wayback/Archive]FreeAndNil safer to use. In order to do so, the method now lies to you by taking a const [ref] parameter which technically it is not allowed to change, but the internal hackery allows it to. Dalija Prasnikar explained it in 2020: [Wayback/Archive] Magic behind FreeAndNil.

The new signature is this:

procedure FreeAndNil(const [ref] Obj: TObject); inline;

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Posted in Conference Topics, Conferences, Delphi, Delphi 10.4 Sydney (Denali), Delphi 11.0 Alexandria (Olympus), Development, EKON, Event, Software Development | 2 Comments »

Reminder to self: check to see if Delphi improved support for MMX/SSE/AVX instructions

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/06/13

This is from a long time ago [Wayback/Archive] Does Delphi support all MMX/SSE instructions? – Stack Overflow:

Delphi 2007 supports the MMX and SSE instruction sets. Certainly, Delphi 2010 and XE support up to the SSE4.2 instruction sets (but so far no support for AVX).

The [Wayback] Delphi 2005 Language Guide explained a bit, but no more recent PDF is available and the [Wayback/Archive] Embarcadero/IDERA Documentation Wiki is very much outdated on this information as per [Wayback/Archive] Talk:Assembler Syntax – RAD Studio:

Re: “Instruction Opcodes” The information on available instruction sets is outdated. D2010 and Fulcrum support the SIMD instruction sets all the way up to SSE4.2 (i.e., SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1 and SSE4.2).

–jeroen

Posted in Assembly Language, Delphi, Development, Software Development, x64, x86 | Leave a Comment »

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