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Steve Maughan

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Posts posted by Steve Maughan

  1. Posted

    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 

  3. Posted · Edited by Steve Maughan

    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 

     

  6. Posted

    On 1/28/2024 at 10:36 AM, Lars Fosdal said:

    Well, my "you" was the general "anyone". And the argument stands: why would anyone chose not to use the massive tooling that already exists for Blazor? Embt would end up in another trying to catch up situation like they did with .net.

    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   

    • Like 1

  7. Posted

    4 hours ago, Lars Fosdal said:

    Why not stay with C# if you want to do Blazor?

    That is where the tooling is, and the language is not that different from Delphi. 

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

  8. Posted

    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

  13. Posted

    21 minutes ago, Attila Kovacs said:

    "Data" is not initialized in your demo

     

    GetMem(Data, iRecordLen);

     

    and that's it, it ponts to trash

    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  

  14. Posted

    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

  15. Posted

    Quote

    ...Chess isn't very computationally heavy....

    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

  16. Posted

    I've used Delphi since it was launched in 1995 and never explored the FPC. Now I'm tinkering on developing a chess engine. For this I'd like the EXE to be as fast as possible. I assume Delphi produces faster EXEs than FPC. Is this correct? I Googled around and the only posts were 10+ years old. They implied Delphi was faster — sometimes by quite a bit.  Has anything changed?

     

    — Steve 

  20. Posted

    I'm converting my chess engine to Delphi. It's a console application that uses the UCI protocol. I'm use "writeln" to send text to the console and have a thread that simply uses "readln" to capture the input from the user. Everything works fine when it's run as a terminal application and I type in the commands. However, when I try to run it using a Chess GUI the communication doesn't happen. I've written a short app using DOScommand and it seems the communication isn't happening between the two applications. What am I missing? How do I capture the standard input sent from the other application? How do I write back my commands to the standard output so it can be processed by the other application (i.e., the chess GUI)?

     

    Thanks, Steve

  21. Posted

    3 minutes ago, Der schöne Günther said:

    Function arguments are always evaluated, then passed into the function. This "IfThen" (which I have never seen before), is just a regular function. The compiler has no knowledge that there is no need to evaluate the other arguments if the first one results to False.

    That makes sense. I learn something new every day!

     

    Thanks,

     

    Steve

  22. Posted

    The following code causes an AV: 

    type

  TFoo = class
  private
    fName: string;
  public
    property Name: string read fName write fName;
  end;

  TForm1 = class(TForm)
    procedure FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
  private
    { Private declarations }
  public
    { Public declarations }
  end;

var
  Form1: TForm1;

implementation

uses
  StrUtils;

{$R *.dfm}

procedure TForm1.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
var
  Foo: TFoo;
begin
  Foo := nil;
  Form1.Caption := IfThen(assigned(Foo), Foo.Name, '');
end;

    The line that cause the AV is the one with the "IfThen" statement. I would have thought this would set the Caption to '' if Foo was not assigned but instead I get an AV. This implies both the True and False expressions are evaluated but I can't see why. Am I missing something obvious? The project is attached. 

     

    Delphi 11.1

     

    Any insights appreciated. 

     

    Steve

    IfThenAV.zip

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