Brandon Staggs

You may as well just stuff all your classes into a single unit so you can achieve this. You don't need the language to undergo a fundamental redesign. As projects grow the issues with circular references can become annoying. I know this well. But the solution is to do better class design, not to embrace the excessive coupling of the classes.

Good information in this thread. @David HeffernanI was actually interested in your reasons for not using SameValue and what you use as an alternative.

Why is it lethal to puppies?

No serious developers are interested in binary-only Delphi components.

Used Apple's support for dual-boot to install Sonoma. Debugging works perfectly fine there.

This did not make a difference.

Well, I did say other Delphi code, but as it turns out, I am able to debug some applications nice and fast, but the "big ones" are ultra-slow. The only difference I can think of that would matter is that the main large application I am having trouble with creates a lot of threads. I know on Windows this can slow debugging down depending on what DLLs are being attached to the threads. So I created a simple app that spins off 100 threads just to see if I could debug it reasonably. That worked fine. So clearly, something we are doing in our application is, somehow, affecting debugging speed. I don't know what that could be. One test I did was to directly run the LLDB debugger from within the PAServer 23 application bundle. It was able to run the application at what seemed to be full speed. I am tempted to learn how to properly use LLDB just because it seems to provide a very snappy debugging experience, even if it is limited since it is not connected with the IDE at all... In desperation I updated to MacOS 15.5 beta 2 just to see if anything would change. Nothing did. I am pretty much stumped at what could cause MacOS ARM64 debugging session to slow to a crawl in Delphi that wouldn't also cause things to go slow on an Intel-based Mac. If I deploy the exact same project to my old Intel MacBook, the main difference being that the build generates x64 code of course, it debugs acceptably. If I deploy it to my M2 (ARM64 build), it debugs at a snail's pace. Ugh.

Other Delphi code. I updated the Mac from 15.3 to 15.4. Sequoia 15.3 was working fine, but I am not 100% sure that this issue coincided with the update. PAServer is deploying over 150 megs of binaries (the app and a bunch of dylibs) in just a few seconds; I use a 2.5 gig wired network connection for this and disable wifi so that PAServer doesn't try to use a slow connection. If there are network issues it's not due to speed but could still be other problems. I will look into that. I am also wondering if upgrading to Delphi 12.3 with the updated PAServer will matter. That's kind of a last resort at this point and seems very unlikely to make a difference.

I'm developing on real hardware. As far as I know there is no legitimate way to run MacOS in a VM, but my information may be outdated. I switched to using a much older Intel MacBook Pro with an older OS, and debugging speed is acceptable on that. I do suspect the OS update. Before this began, debugging and stepping through ARM64 code on the Mac was actually quicker than stepping through Win64 code on the same PC as the Delphi IDE, which I always found ironic. I tried debugging other code on the M2 and all of it was extremely slow.

I am hoping someone else has experienced this and can share a solution. Last week my debugging MacOS applications through PAServer became extremely slow. Code executes but (apparently) the communication between the debugging process on the Mac and on the Windows PC is so slow as to be unusable. If I detach from the process the application will suddenly start running at normal speeds. No breakpoints are needed for this problem to happen, just the act of running it with the debugger attached slows everything down to an unusable speed. It is possible, but I do not know if this timing is correct, that this happened after updating the Mac to Sequoia 15.4. The Mac is an M2 Pro model with a 2.5 gig wired ethernet connection (wifi disabled). Deploying to the Mac is super fast from Delphi. It's not a network speed issue. I have already tried updating XCode and updating the SDK profile in Delphi. Details: Apple M2 Pro, Sequoia 15.4 Wired ethernet (2.5 gig), deployment speed is very very fast even for large transfers. Delphi 12.2. Target: MacOSX ARM 64 bit, SDK 15.4. Does anyone who debugs MacOS FMX applications have any suggestions on what might be suddenly slowing down the debug process? I can confirm that code is running and I can step through it, it's just SUPER slow to do so, the main form takes several minutes to appear (but eventually does), after which it remains ultra-slow.

No, I don't see the point -- there are already so many people who actually do hardware comparisons for a living writing about it. Aside from commenting here in the context of a Delphi developer, I don't have time to write my experience in detail. I will just add this: I bought a Snapdragon Windows PC when I saw that users of my software were installing it on Snapdragon Windows PCs, but that the 32-bit version of my software was appearing instead of the 64-bit. I quickly realized this was due to how the Inno Setup script was written, which assumed that if x64 was not available that the system needed the 32-bit x86 binaries installed. Inno added support for some additional scripting functions to better handle this and I wanted to test my software on Snapdragon so I bought one and fixed the install script. That works perfectly. And now any time I need to grab a portable PC I take the Snapdragon one because its the lightest Windows PC I have and the one with the best battery life. I've had no issues doing what I need to do on it. This is not some cheesy WinRT netbook from 12 years ago that can only open a web browser and play Candy Crush and run Office apps. This is the Windows answer to an Apple MacBook (which I have two of also).

Yes, I remember that. However, we are already well-past that point for two reasons: 1. Windows on ARM is not a competing operating system or any more than Windows x64 with WOW was competing with x86. 2. There is already massive support for ARM64 Windows in the form of tons and tons of native binaries already available. Nobody has to wait for this to eventually happen. It is happening now. Actually, it happened at the end of last year.

We're not talking about some stripped-down WinRT "Windows store only" operating system that doesn't run 99.99% of the software made for Windows, like the previous Windows on ARM devices. The current offering from Microsoft runs both x86 and x64 binaries and does not require the Windows Store (unless someone buys a Windows-S version of the OS, but that is also shipped on x64 and has nothing to do with ARM). The Prism emulation layer is seamless. As long as you aren't expecting to run AAA games on one, or other software requiring that kind of hardware, ARM is a viable choice, and in fact a superior choice if you need portability with energy performance. This is an expansion of the Windows ecosystem because vendors now have the ability to offer hardware with far better energy performance than what x64 CPUs allowed in the past. A hardware vendor does not have to take a bet that Microsoft will succeed with a new platform -- Microsoft has owned this market for 30 years. Of course Delphi needs to offer an ARM64 compiler for Windows. And why should that be a problem? Delphi has shipped with ARM compilers for years.

Everything I have used on my Lenovo CoPilot+ notebook runs seamlessly, including my own compiled Delphi applications. I cannot perceive any difference between it and my other laptop when it comes to running Windows applications. I have not installed Delphi on it (no reason for me to do that) but keep in mind Delphi has been working just fine on Apple Silicon in Parallels for years. I imagine that the Prism emulator in Windows would not be an issue for the Delphi IDE. But I am not testing that.

Windows on ARM does not need to unseat two entrenched ecosystems to be successful like Windows Phone did. There is no comparison. Most of the people buying a Windows computer do not need to care if the CPU is ARM or x64. On the flip side, however, since ARM-based Windows machines run x64 apps just fine, there is no real pressure on Embarcadero to rush offering a compiler.