Steve Maughan

Due to my rabid enthusiasm for trying the latest release, I installed RAD Studio 12.3 before yesterday's webinar. I was upgrading from 12.2. The previous upgrade from 12.1 was uneventful, so I was hopeful 12.3 would be similar. Initially I really regretted the decision. I got a lot of load errors, mostly to do with DevExpress. The system wouldn't load properly and entered an infinite loop of errors. I reinstalled but still had problems. I then ran the last DevExpress install application and selected the Repair option. This fixed everything. I had to reinstall all the GetIt components but I'm not back up and running. One point to note, the 64 bit IDE doesn't have any of my components loaded, so it really isn't ready for prime time (although the preview is appreciated). Hope this is helpful! — Steve

I've just repeated the 500k test and there is indeed quite a bit of variation across the parallel times. They range from 10 ms to 25 ms. The single core times are quite consistent at 63 ms to 65 ms. — Steve

The new TParallelArray<T> seems like a drop-in replacement for TArray<T>. I tested the performance of the parallel sort algorithm on my Intel i9-12900HK laptop. This has 6 performance cores (with hyperthreading) and 8 efficient cores. Here are the results: One Billion Double Values: TArray<>: 183.8 seconds TParallelArray<>: 34.8 seconds Speed-up: x5.3 Five Million Double Values: TArray<>: 692 ms TParallelArray<>: 122 ms Speed-up: x5.7 500k Double Values: TArray<>: 65 ms TParallelArray<>: 18 ms Speed-up: x3.6 This speed up seems quite good to me. — Steve

Does anyone know how to access the new TParallelArray capabilities? I can't find any documentation on the website. — Steve

That gives me hope

Hi Lars, You may be right but I find parallel with the current situation with Blazor and 1994 with VB 3. When Delphi was launched VB had first-mover advantage in the RAD development market. There were lots of ActiveX components. Then Delphi came along and provided a cleaner way to develop and the executables were lightning fast. Now we have Blazor and all of the .net luggage that needs to be installed. To me Blazor seems cluncky in the same way VB was clunky back in 1994. I see a sizable gap in the market for Blazor challenger. The key components would be a page-builder (like the ones for WordPress), the ability to drop controls on GUI and change properties, and then create events and code in Delphi / Visual Pascal. If the whole app was then compiled to WASM and run on any browser that would be wonderful. But you might be right, it might be too much for Embarcadero to pull off. Steve

Hi Lars — I don’t have specific project need. This post was more of a desire for Embarcadero to move in this direction.

Blazor is an interesting technology: web development using C#, compiling to WebAssembly. There’s also App Builder that can do create Blazor GUIs in a RAD style environment. Does anyone know of any plans to do something similar with Delphi? It seems this would be in the original spirit of Delphi i.e. RAD development compiling to native executable. I know there are things like TMS WebCore, but they compile to JavaScript, whereas WASM would (I assume) be significantly faster. Thoughts? — Steve

Thanks @Remy Lebeau — I'll take a look.

@Cristian Peța this version works perfectly. Many thanks — I owe you one!! @Brian Evans Thanks — that makes sense. @Attila Kovacs thanks for the input! — Steve

Hi Cristian — many thanks but the file you uploaded is identical to the original. Is there a patched version? I owe you bigtime! — Steve

@Cristian Peța you found it!! When I disable the ASLR in Delphi 11.3 it also runs fine in 64 bit mode. That makes sense. MANY THANKS! Now the question is, how do I make it work with ASLR enabled. — Steve

Thanks Attila, but I didn't think "Data" needed to be initialized. The GetMem function is asking the OS to allocate some memory of length "iRecord", and sets "Data" to point to the start of the allocated memory. Is this not correct? — Steve

I recently updated to D11.3 for AlignMix, our mapping solution. We were previously using D11.1. We have old code that reads a DBF file. This is used to read the DBF files associated with ESRI Shapefiles that contain geographic data. The code had worked for eight years without a problem. It still works in 32 bit mode but now doesn't work in 64 bit mode and gives an error. The DBF reading routine contains code that casts blocks of memory as strings etc — this is probably the root of the problem. If anyone is interested, I've attached a sample project that reads a DBF file using the code. In the sample project I only get two warnings: [dcc32 Warning] uDBF.pas(155): W1000 Symbol 'StrPas' is deprecated: 'Moved to the AnsiStrings unit' [dcc32 Warning] uDBF.pas(216): W1057 Implicit string cast from 'AnsiString' to 'string' Are these relevant? Question: what changed between D11.1 and D11.3 that could cause this type of problem? Was there any change involving casting of strings in 64 bit mode? All help appreciated! Steve DBF-64-Bit-Bug.zip

I can't tell if you're joking or not. There are not many tasks more computationally intensive than chess. Of course I'll benchmark but just wanted to know if anyone had any broad-brush insights that could save me some time. Thanks, Steve