Brandon Staggs

I can only imagine how bad AI will be in the future when it is pulling in this kind of garbage text and putting out even more garbage text. Some people dream of AI being able to design new levels of AI. But I think what will happen is AI will just churn out more useless gobbledygook in larger and larger quantities in a feedback loop until all the universe's data capacity is consumed by mounds of useless generated text that is grammatically reasonable but doesn't say a thing.

Oh come off it. Nobody cares if you use it or not. Your posts are so overly verbose and grandiose that even if there is merit in what you are asking for, nobody can find it. In fact, you seem like you are trolling us with AI generated gibberish that almost but not quite seems to be making a point. And I would prefer not to feed trolls.

Since the Windows 8 debacle, Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI/platform strategy. I can't see any reason why Embarcadero would try to chase Microsoft's fleeting "latest and greatest" in that area. They already have VCL and FMX. That's enough. I'd rather them complete their 64-bit IDE and give me an ARM compiler for Windows than bother trying to get Microsoft pinned down on the "right way" to make new Windows projects. It will just change again in a couple of years.

Of course. If someone wants to pay me my going rate, I'd stop everything and create one. As it stands, I hope to find time to work on creating one. The million+ lines of code that don't belong to me can't just be posted in attlasian's system.

Sure. I've said that three times already in this thread, so that would be appropriate.

In a recent post, Marco said much the same thing as was said in the Webinar: https://embt.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1/RSS-1887 My original inference that they are starting over with a new approach seems correct in light of this. Here we have "back to the drawing board" and "architecture" in the same sentence. Surely Marco knows how this will be interpreted.

A non-starter for us, as the 64-bit LSP Server only supports Windows targets.

The changes are work product for one company. They can't be used by other projects. I'm sure someone else may suggest a VM. That would work if it wasn't for the fact that our products don't work in a VM which makes developing that way a major pain. What I was left wishing for is a docker container for Windows GUI applications. I'd like to just shove an instance of Delphi into a container so I can run on the metal and modify the installed files without affecting other projects that don't need them.

Without adding the other VCL (or rtl, fmx, etc) paths, the modified pas file will not link with the others. We've modified System.Classes, for example. Almost all of the RTL and FMX units have to be rebuilt.

No amount of tweaking the browsing path was able to work around the problem. In fact the reason this took me so long to work around is because I trusted the documentation. I had to actually make the original source files unreachable.

I'd like to, but without including an example project that shows the problem, it will be ignored. I haven't had time to see if I can make a small application that uses a local copy of an rtl or fmx unit with an incompatible interface to see if it works as an example. And the LSP issues we experienced were intermittent -- LSP would be okay 20% of the time, so I suspect it's a combination of factors.

For years LSP has been broken on our very large code base. The main problem being "Find Declaration" is non-functional. We also experience problems when switching between Win64 and MacOS build targets; usually doing so without cleaning the project results in the IDE crashing or the compiler crashing or both. I complained about this earlier today in this post: Today, I was stepping through code in our MacOS build when I noticed that the IDE was taking me to the wrong source file. That clued me into what was going on. This project has about 40 local copies of Delphi source files to fix various bugs and add some needed access to private fields, etc. (Trust me, we hate to do this, we don't want to do this, but when the FMX code base assumes only one thread will ever want to use bitmaps and stuff like that, we have no choice). Of course these local copies appear first in the search path. This naturally necessitates that the other source files are rebuilt, and they are listed in the search path, lower down. The compiler works perfectly fine; our modifications are built without issue. But the IDE and LSP hate this. While stepping through code, it took me to the original FMX.COntrols.pas file, not the local copy that is being compiled into the build. No amount of tweaking the search path or browsing path helped. This got me thinking that this could be related to code navigation issues. So I went into the Rad Studio installation folder and renamed all of the source files for which we have a local copy, so that it would be impossible for the IDE or LSP Server to reach them. And like magic, every single problem I have been having with code navigation suddenly went away. Even switching between MacOS and Win64 build targets and compiling became a seamless operation. So, it appears clear that the LSP Server and IDE do not take the same clues as the compiler or linker or whatever when it comes to search paths. And chaos ensues, due probably to incompatible interfaces that exist between unmodified fmx classes and our local forks. Now I could be overstating the effectiveness of this fix, but I spent an hour doing things I know break the IDE and they all worked. The problem is now I have gone nuclear on the Delphi source folders and no other projects can use them. What I would like to do is have a different copy of the BDS /source/ folder that is used for this project. But we already know a wholesale copy into the search path won't fix it, because those files are already there. We need the IDE to treat a different folder as canonical for $BDS/source. I already use the -r command line switch for the IDE to isolate this project into its own registry hive, but I could not find a way to override the BDS variable (nor do I think that is the right solution). This brings me to my question -- going to Tools/Options and trying to override the BDS environment variable creates an error since it is "built-in." My current solution is clunky -- maintain two source copies of the BDS source folder, one with all the files and one with files removed that we have local copies of -- and switch between the two depending on what project I am working on. But is there a way to tell the IDE and LSP Server to use a different source folder? (Probably not, because if so, it would already be working based on the project settings, LOL!) If I can get time I may try to make a small project that reproduces one of these problems, but this is a million+ line project and it could have to do with a combination of factors, not just the fact that we have local copies of stuff like FMX.Controls with incompatible interfaces.

I went ahead and installed 12.3 in a VM to see if LSP would work properly in our large code base. It actually seemed worse -- I had 12.2 open in one and 12.3 open in another and Find Declaration was working better in 12.2 (that is to say, on the same symbol, I could get to the declaration in 12.2 when I couldn't in 12.3). That isn't saying much though -- they both fail to work most of the time, and both of them will consistently open the wrong source file if the declaration exists in a forked FMX/VCL/RTL unit. I suspect in our case the forked units are probably causing LSP to trip up. We have fixed numerous problems in FMX in particular and have no choice but to maintain our own copies of these units. They appear in the search path properly and compile correctly, but using the stack trace or find declaration in these typically opens the wrong source file (going to the BDS source folder instead of our local copies). I have experimented with the browsing and search paths to no avail. Even though the compiler uses the correct unit, the IDE just can't seem to cope, and I suspect that incompatibilities are messing up LSP, but I have no way to know for sure. What's really funny is that sometimes CTRL+Click will take me to the BDS source file on the wrong line but CTRL+G will take me to the (correct) local copy. Usually neither work at all though.

That's fair. In my mind, when we start talking about a "new architecture," we go beyond fixing bugs in a system to using a new approach. But it could be that I am misunderstanding what is intended by the statement "new architecture." Though one wonders why this "new architecture" requires waiting for a breaking release. The impression I was left with, after watching that segment of the video three times in a row, was that they know full-well that LSP is still very broken and requires a redesign and they are waiting for a major release rather than fixing the thing in 12.1 or 12.2 or now 12.3. I watched the webinar live and tried to ask a follow-up question about LSP fixes and again felt as though they were saying big changes coming in 13, but that is just an impression and the Q&A is not available in the YouTube post. Too bad we don't have something like a road map to clarify things for us.

Edit: as was pointed out by someone else, this non-native speaker may not mean what I mean by "new architecture." But here's what I was referring to: 42 minute mark. Listen carefully where he says there will be a "new architecture" in the next major release.