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Well I'm a C++ MVP and active C++ user and I check this forum from time to time. If I can I do make the odd (hopefully) helpful comment. I also check Stack Overflow for questions tagged C++ Builder. Stack Overflow is a good place to post if you have a specific question. Here is the best place I can find for somewhat more imprecise (but still civilised and helpful) discussions. I too miss the old Embarcadero forums. I pushed as hard as I could to get Embarcadero to keep them. They were getting lots of public viewable negative feedback about some of their releases. I feel they should have used this as a low cost way of learning what they needed to concentrate on improving. But it seems that rather than fixing the problems that were annoying their customers their marketing dept. insisted that they close the mechanism of reporting down. They do have good products and they do have a good marketing team - but they do need to make sure that they listen to their customers and respond effectively to what they are not doing well. By closing their forum they lost an opportunity to do this.....

A few weeks ago I was thinking to myself... boy, do I miss Rudy Velthuis. There's so much I wish I could talk with him about. Then I did some googling and found some archived discussions. I found Rudy and the old, evil version of Nick Hodges arguing that it would be of no benefit at all for Embarcadero to allow users to submit code fixes, also insisting that the Delphi test cases were vast and robust. I was there too, pointing out how useful user-submitted patches have been to open source software, citing the Linux kernel. Then Rudy replied to me that if he had his way, even the Linux kernel wouldn't be allowed to accept code submissions. I drew a few conclusions: Do I still miss Rudy? YES. Was Rudy a very wise and intelligent person to converse with? Yes. Did I enjoy discussing things with Rudy? Yes. Did I enjoy discussing things with Rudy when he got like that? No. It was the toxic environment in the forums that brought people to bombast, rhetoric, refusal to concede points, personal attacks, etc. Do I miss the old forum? NO. Here people can discuss things intelligently without getting nasty or defending a lost cause to the point of being ridiculous. I mean, here we talk about type inference... back on the old forum, I brought up the subject as one of the must-have features for Delphi as soon as possible and one person insisted that type inference was, and I quote, "just the compiler guessing". He continued to insist this after I explained the Handley-Millner Type Inference Algorithm to him, along with its mathematical guarantee of correctness. Then he declared that "a compiler should only do one thing" and type inference would be two things, so it shouldn't be part of the compiler. Another poster went on and on about rejecting modern features in Delphi. Someone asked how they felt about the Delphi string type and they replied that they don't use it where possible, only PChars (!!!). Even Rudy had to concede that this was detrimental and extreme. So... many... weird... conversations there. This place is so much more... sane... in comparison.

That notice has been in the documentation since XE4. All ANSI types (P/AnsiChar, AnsiString/(N), ShortString) were disabled in the NEXTGEN mobile compilers in XE3. Under NEXTGEN, UTF8String and RawByteString were re-enabled in 10.1 Berlin, and then the rest of the ANSI types were re-enabled in 10.4 Sydney when NEXTGEN was dropped completely so mobile platforms now match desktop platforms in terms of language features. Looks like the ShortString documentation has not been updated yet to reflect that. Yes. Only in XE3 through 10.3. In 10.4 onward, ShortString can be used on mobile. No. Because ALL ANSI types were initially eliminated, as mobile platforms are Unicode-based. Then the types slowly started being re-introduced as needs arose, until eventually Embarcadero decided that having separate compiler architectures just wasn't working out. Hardly.

Avoid using short strings. Short string is for backwards compatibility only (typically for older desktop apps migrated to the new). They are ANSI based and do not support Unicode natively, and have been deprecated since 2009 when the Unicode string format was made king of the hill. Byte still is a useful number format when you don't need a large range,

<ARG!> I just now noticed that you are connecting to Office 365 on port 993. That is an IMPLICIT TLS port. But, you are not using any TLS settings on your TIdIMAP4 at all! Rather than assigning a TIdIOHandlerStack component to the TIdIMAP4.IOHandler property, you need to assign a TIdSSLIOHandlerSocketBase-derived component instead, like TIdSSLIOHandlerSocketOpenSSL (TIdSSLIOHandlerSocketBase derives from TIdIOHandlerStack and thus also has the TransparentProxy property). And then set the TIdIMAP4.UseTLS property to utUseImplicitTLS.

In addition to the support of Delphi 11, the sources of a new demo thought for the mobiles are available. The CartoTrack demo is a tutorial to discover the basics of the component. TECNativeMap is an equivalent of Google Map without any use of a WebBrowser because it is 100% Delphi. It is available in VCL and FMX versions on all platforms supported by Delphi Download the trial version for Delphi 11 Download the trial version for Delphi 10.4.x 

Marketing strategy? Really? Just because you disagree with the decision to deprecate it doesn't make it a stupid decision, driven by "marketing". The deprecation of "object" was also controversial but that wasn't driven by marketing either. I'm pretty sure management, marketing and sales couldn't care less about these things.

Devart rolled out the new Delphi Data Access Components for just released RAD Studio 11 Alexandria with support for Firebird 4 and Apple M1 processors. Devart, a recognized vendor of world-class data connectivity solutions for various data connection technologies and frameworks, presented new versions of Delphi Data Access Components to keep assisting software engineers in developing fast native applications. The key feature of the recently updated products is support for the newly released RAD Studio 11 Alexandria. The release also includes such important enhancements: All Devart Delphi Data Access Components now support Apple M1 processors. Devart became the first vendor of Delphi components with Firebird 4 support. UniDAC now includes new data providers for HubSpot and BigQuery that allow users to connect to these data sources from Delphi or C ++ Builder applications. UniDAC supports the latest version of NexusDB 4.50.27. LiteDAC and UniDAC support a new option - IntegerAsLargeInt, which maps SQLite INTEGER columns to fields of type ftLargeInt. In addition, a new demo project for FastReport FMX is available in all DAC products. To learn more about the recent release, visit: https://blog.devart.com/delphi-data-access-components-for-rad-studio-alexandria.html Delphi Data Access Components are the libraries of components for Delphi developers that provide direct access to multiple databases, and allow developing multi-platform applications in Embarcadero RAD Studio, Delphi, C++Builder, Lazarus, and Free Pascal on Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android, for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. About Devart Devart is one of the leading developers of database tools and administration software, ALM solutions, data providers for various database servers, data integration, and backup solutions. The company also implements Web and Mobile development projects. For additional information about Devart, visit https://www.devart.com/.

ShortString have a big advantage: they can be allocated on the stack. So they are perfect for small ASCII text, e.g. numbers to text conversion, or when logging information in plain English. Using str() over a shortstring is for instance faster than using IntToString() and a temporary string (or AnsiString) on a multi-thread program, because the heap is not involved. Of course, we could use a static array of AnsiChar, but ShortString have an advantage because they have their length encoded so they are safer and faster than #0 terminated strings. So on mobile platform, we could end up by creating a new record type, re-inventing the wheel whereas the ShortString type is in fact still supported and generated by the compiler, and even used by the RTL at its lowest system level. ShortString have been deprecated... and hidden. They could even be restored/unhidden by some tricks like https://www.idefixpack.de/blog/2016/05/system-bytestrings-for-10-1-berlin Why? Because some people at Embarcadero thought it was confusing, and that the language should be "cleaned up" - I translate by "more C# / Java like", with a single string type. This was the very same reason they did hide RawByteString and AnsiString... More a marketing strategy than a technical decision IMHO. I prefer the FPC more "conservative" way of preserving backward compatibility. It is worth noting that the FPC compiler source code itself uses a lot of shortstring internally, so it would never be deprecated on FPC for sure. 😉

I hope Joe is better at coding than designing web sites 🙂

Sure, that and array[0..n] of Byte; are pretty common. Still, Byte sized variables and constants are used a lot in various APIs. Even nuggets like SizeOf(Byte); can be found sprinkled around the RTL and VCL, although I believe the universal result of that is 1.

That's not really why byte is useful. Byte is primarily useful to store binary data, typically as TArray<Byte>. It's rare to use Byte to store a count for example.

foo(Copy(aValue, 1, 20));

No there is not. However, you really should not be using short strings at all. These only exist for backwards compatibility with legacy code.

string[20] is, AFAIK, ansi string (= expect problems...).

type TTwenty: string [20]; This is a shortstring and should not be used in programs as it is only for backward compatibility.

Thank you for these details!

After I updated my phone to iOS 15.0, the apps that were already on it, compiled with Delphi 10.4.2 using iOS 14.5 SDK, ran without any warnings. Xcode 13 is now installed, and I was able to import the iOS 15.0 SDK. EDIT: As per this report on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/137012246341854/posts/4389107827798920 App Store builds using Xcode 13 FAIL. Dev builds are OK. I'm looking into why the App Store build fails EDIT 2: App Store builds work if Release config is selected. I'm pretty sure that in earlier versions of Xcode, it did not matter if Debug config was used. A word of warning about installing Xcode 13: When I used the App Store app on the Mac to update Xcode, it spent a couple of hours "stuck" at around the 95% mark. I ended up restarting my machine, and it went back to around 75%: I waited another hour or so, and it did not move, so I gave up, and downloaded Xcode 13 from the developer site: https://developer.apple.com/download/release/ The link to the released version of Xcode 13 seems to have disappeared from that link at the moment - hopefully it will re-appear. Anyway, I made a backup of Xcode 12.5.1 in my /Applications folder first, and after downloading Xcode 13, opened a command-line window and executed this: cd /Applications sudo xip -x [path_to_download]/Xcode_13.xip Where [path_to_download] is the path that I downloaded Xcode 13 to. This unarchives Xcode 13 into the /Applications folder. sudo is required for permissions to unarchive to /Applications

They most likely have justified abandonment issues..

I too miss Rudy, but to be honest he was also the main reason I stopped participating in the old fora; So many interesting topics deteriorated into endless yes, no, yes, no, discussions. That and the misuse of moderation power that were going on killed my interest.

Has nothing to do with the debugger but with a refactoring to TList which I suggested: https://quality.embarcadero.com/browse/RSP-34681 (probably cannot see that as it still seems to be marked as beta report)

Hi all, So I had been looking forward to some juicy update for this version of Delphi. Looking at the roadmap I thought they have this one in the bag for me. 2 things I was looking forward to were.. 1) Delphi Language Extensions for increasingly powerfull coding 2) Math performance improvements to increase your application speed Do these come in the form of later updates...

Irrelevant. Good products are cohesive. Different aspects work with each other and support each other. Funny. Binary literals, digit separators and avx512 asm. That's the entirety of new language features. That's a pace that can only be described as glacial. Cant be hard to get the old formatter to work. If it's an arse for them to do it, tough. Their adult for building up so much technical debt. Honestly, look at the quality of what comes out of Emba and compare to other mainstream IDEs.

There seems to be more general problem with updating Xcode. Just few days ago I spent 6 hours installing Xcode 12.5.1 It managed to finish only after I deleted old Xcode from applications folder and cleared the trash.

Honestly you'd think they'd have got the memo by now!!! What is wrong with them?!!