dummzeuch

That's correct, there isn't any.

They possibly are. I was referring to those that are also sold from small Chinese companies or possibly individuals directly to Europe via Amazon or other online marketplaces. They seem to just put every buzzword they can find into the description, sometimes even conflicting ones.

I that case, he should buy the PC without or with a small SSD and then upgrade it.

Both seem to be OK to me. The thing with those China produced mini PCs is that the descriptions contain every buzzword on the planet and are not necessary correct, so you better read the reviews and questions/answers too. Even though the descriptions say the OS is DOS, they might still come with Windows 11 pre installed. But you should be wary about that installation. See my previous answer regarding that issue.

The Mac Mini could qualify as a mini PC. But yeah it doesn't really answer the question.

I am using a Fujitsu Esprimo Q920 (released in 2014!) with an i5 mobile processor, 16 GB of RAM and an SSD running Windows 10 for Delphi development (all versions from Delphi 6 -blindingly fast - to Delphi 12 - rather slow but usable). I bought it cheap in a refurbished deal on Amazon.de. It's far from being a rocket, but fine for my hobby software development needs. I also installed Proxmox on a cheap mini PC with an Intel N95 processor, 16 GB of RAM and an SSD I got from Geekbuying (came with Windows 11). I am running a Windows 10 virtual machine on it on which I'm testing GExperts on Delphi 12. That setup is definitely not what I would want to use at work, but again, for hobby software development it is kinda OK. If you leave out the virtual machine part but run Windows directly on the hardware it is faster than the Q920. So: Given enough RAM and an SSD I think basically any current mini PC is OK for that purpose. This may depend on whether you want to use some third party tools and components though. These can slow down the IDE quite a bit. And of course you may think I'm crazy for using such a low powered setup. 😉 Regarding Geekbuying: Beware that that's a platform like Amazon market place. So there are black sheep there. I bought a BMAX mini PC with pre installed Windows 11 from them and it turned out that The pre installed Windows 11 came with some rather dubious software additions, so I tried to do a fresh install. Which turned up that ... the computer does not meet Windows 11 minimum requirements (no TPM, unsupported processor). They must have installed it using the tricks you can find on the web. Which means that it would have had problems with the next major update. But even with these tricks ... the license cannot be used to do a fresh Windows 11 installation. I tried to get a refund but they kept on sending demands for proof (pictures and even a video using some Chinese service) and then simply ignored me. So I definitely don't recommend buying there. (The hardware is rather nice though, if you don't want to install Windows on it.)

Interesting project. You can also buy the sources. But they use Digital River to sell their licenses ...

A Delphi installation without GExperts is broken. 😉 You are probably right: I should not regard something as a Delphi bug unless I can confirm it is not cause by a 3rd party, and GExperts is a 3rd party, even though that's stretching the meaning as that 3rd party is myself.

On that computer there has never been a Delphi 12 installation (only 2007, XE2 and 10.2). The only addon is GExperts. No additional components. I think that's a pretty clean installation.

I hereby take that back: 12.2 Patch1 is not a total catastrophe, but I no longer classify the glitches I am experiencing as minor. Every few times I want to run the program in the debugger, the IDE freezes with 100% CPU on one core and has to be killed and restarted. That's a major annoyance. And this is a new project which only uses components that come preinstalled with Delphi 12.2 Patch1 and which is not large at all. I'll stick with Delphi 2007 and 10.x for other projects for now.

I have been using it for about a week now and don't see any such problems. So either I have got a very special installation or you have one. edit: There are quite a few minor glitches though, but it's getting better.

That's the bpl incompatibility problem of Delphi 12.2 that the patch 1 was meant to solve. Unfortunately you now get an error if you have any 3rd party bpls or experts that were compiled with Delphi 12.2. Older ones (compiled with Delphi 12.0 or 12.1) do not have that problem. Solution: If you have the source code, recompile those packages / experts. If you don't have the source code, contact the person/company that supplied those binaries for an update

For years I have trained myself to press Shift+F2 to open the GExperts Rename Component Expert. This worked fine for all Delphi IDEs up to 10.2 and I think even in Delphi 12.2 (but I am not sure because I didn't use it very often). Now, in Delphi 12.2 patch 1, all of a sudden, pressing Shift+F2 on a (VCL) form opens and focuses the Object Inspector . Is that something that's supposed to happen? Is it documented anywhere? It's not in the list of Default IDE keyboard shortcuts in the online help. That one says that F11 opens and focuses the Object Inspector, which is wrong because F11 switches between Object Inspector, the form and the source code as it has done since eternity. The only expert installed in this IDE is GExperts.

Multiline string literals are actually supported by the GExperts code formatter. https://blog.dummzeuch.de/2023/11/26/gexperts-code-formatter-now-supports-multi-line-string-literals-but/ https://blog.dummzeuch.de/2023/12/04/that-was-easier-than-i-thought-yeah-right/ But there are some Generics constructs that it can't handle.

The filter for the Explicit* properties was contributed by Achim Kalwa and I have never looked closely at the code, so I don't know how it works and whether it might allow filtering other properties.

Are you aware that Indy also uses DLLs for SSL? I don't know of any solution that does not require DLLs.

I usually don't prepare anything. I just run the update installer and expect it to simply work (which it mostly does). Having said that, I don't use GetIt to install anything apart from patches and I always compile components and - if possible - plugins from source, so the possibilities for the installer to mess up are limited. Also, I am not using the current Delphi version for production work (apart from the obvious maintenance for GExperts and a few other version specific tools), so if an update goes wrong, it won't be a catastrophe, unless it breaks an older Delphi version too.

I have got a need to execute some simple Perl scripts on a Ubuntu Linux server on the LAN (no Internet involved). So far, I am executing them via Putty in an ssh session that shows a small menu written in Perl. But that's cumbersome and I would prefer to have a Delphi client that requests a service to execute them. As these commands require root privileges (*1) security is a big deal, so at least https and basic authentication should be used. I could probably install Apache or a different web server and execute these commands via cgi, but this feels way overblown. Some kind of REST API is what I am looking for, but I don't have any experience with the server side of that. Any suggestions? Just in case anybody wants to suggest that: We don't have a Delph license that allows writing Linux programs. (*1: It's about creating zfs datasets and snapshots and changing their mount points.)

Unfortunately the included dll did not work for me. I googled the error message (which I no longer recall) and found the advice to switch to the dlls from the PHP project. Those dlls worked fine with the same code and the same ssh server.

That's so obvious that I just asked myself why I didn't think of it. So, thanks a lot! I could either call plink.exe (from Putty) or even easier, use libssh2 and the pascal bindings from @pyscripter. In fact I just got the sources, downloaded the libssh2 and openssl dlls from the PHP project page and changed the SshExec demo to bypass the password prompt and call a test script as root. Worked fine. And as a plus I don't even have to install anything on the server, just use the existing ssh server, create some scripts and allow the appropriate users to call them as root without password in the sudoers configuration.

Sorry, my fault for not asking properly: I am not looking for a tool to replace Putty + the menu or the Linux shell, I am looking for a tool that allows a Delphi program to initiate starting those scripts, e.g. via a REST service.

Wow, that's quite a list of fixes.

1.8% rating is far from being popular. It's just marginally better than the 1.64% of SQL on place 11. Compare that to the ratings of the top 3! That's one of the problems with this "index". The differences between the rankings even some in the top 10 are lower than the error margins of the data source.

The languages at the top of that list have changed quite a bit since the last time I looked. Probably means that was a long time ago. I'm sure python was not yet in the top ten back then.

I usually prefix functions like this with "Try", so instead of function GetTheValue(parameters ...): SomeType; it's function TryGetTheValue(parameters ...; out Value: SomeType): Boolean;