David Heffernan

Wrong. It also lets the compiler out the meta data, the unwind data, needed to restore the register in case of an exception. Read Allen's article.

CAS from OTL does restore rbx, but it should do so using .pushnv, for the reasons that Allen's article explains.

No it is not. It modifies rbx and does not restore it.

This is the point that I've been making all along.

Not being able to do that one thing would hardly invalidate the entire enterprise. We'd still be able to use the type as procedure argument which is the main thing we are striving for. But the whole argument is predicted on this single pass. It's no big deal to pass over each type section twice to process forward declarations. Won't make a blind bit of difference to performance. Bottom line is that it is perfectly possible to do this if Emba wanted to.

If what you say were true, then class forward references would not exist.

I can't see where RBX is restored in that InterlockedCompareExchange128 code. It's a NV register. Function needs to start with .PUSHNV RBX I can't vouch for the rest of what it does.

You can't be doing multithreaded programming where "whilst still not perfect" as a valid statement. It's got to be right.

Not sure it's relevant but that x64 should use .PUSHNV to preserve rbx. And I think that also makes .NOFRAME incorrect.

The FMX bitmap that you save is a compressed bitmap. The VCL bitmap is a Windows bitmap, uncompressed.

I don't think that mixing VCL and FMX will work. So I'd just rule that out.

Wouldn't it just be easier to detect the webcam without trying to mix FMX into the system?

With over a million lines of code, it's an epic task to migrate. I can't believe that the increase in compiler time would be significant.

C# compilation is pretty darn fast. Delphi compilation for 64 bit on Windows is not exactly fast. I'm sure that a first pass to define record type layouts followed by a second pass for everything else would not be costly. This isn't going to be about compilation speedy. It's about the pain of refactoring the front end.

It is possible. Plenty of languages can handle this. Emba could implement it if they chose to.

Well no, of course not. So we are stuck with this second rate language.

The argument is that its a single pass compile. So make it two pass. Simples.

You should be able to forward declare their methods. No reason not to be able to do that.

Bloody annoying that this can't be done

I personally don't think you can do better than helpers. That's what I do.

You think wrong

Find out by debugging. Set a breakpoint on SetLastError. And inspect the call stack when it triggers.

The only error here is the code that calls GetLastError and uses the value at a time when its return value is meaningless. All you have to do is to stop doing that.

Yeah, should be using '%p' format string

Sure. But so what?