Brandon Staggs

Modern web browser design is virtually all asynchronous, so there is no way to do the kinds of things we once did synchronously through direct access to the DOM. I have thousands of lines of code that interacts with the old Internet Explorer COM web browser which I am not looking forward to some day completely rewriting in JavaScript so I can use WebView2....

I think this is more like telling a chef he shouldn't dare use a knife because knives are too dangerous and needs to learn how to prepare his food without knives and if he doesn't then he is like people who carry weapons into airports. Or something.

Wow, you just drew a parallel between using pointer math and carrying weapons on to planes. I'm pretty sure this thread just jumped the shark. I'll refrain from engaging in a conversation about personal sovereignty and weapons here, because it obviously has nothing to do with Delphi having features for doing pointer and bitwise math, LOL.

You're correct, of course. I just found the "just because you can" charge to be dismissive. He doesn't get that there are good reasons to use these features. Saying they are only used "just because you can" is ignorant, but also arrogantly so.

So what? Lots of people use Delphi to do it and... why is that a problem for you? You seem irrationally fixated on the fact that some people use this tool for tasks you would not personally use it to accomplish. An no, not "just because you can." "Just because you can" doesn't pay the bills. Anyway I hardly see the point in trying to explain it to someone who seems absolutely determined not to get it.

If you know the UTF-8 strings have been normalized the same way and you want to test for equality, then do a simple memory comparison. If you need to do anything more complex than that (case-insensitivity, ignoring diacritics, accounting for different normalizations, etc) , then there is no reason not to convert the strings anyway.

Microsoft has been "increasing the pressure" on non-WinTel32 development for a decade. I remember thinking Embarcadero needed to hurry up and give me an option to target Windows Phone. Then to get serious about WinRT for Windows 8. Etc. Windows on ARM may indeed eventually matter, but I can hardly fault Embarcadero for taking a "wait and see" approach to the latest-and-greatest non-Win32 "pressure increase" from Microsoft.

I'll avoid direct pointer math when I can, but when you need to drive video, text, and geometry effects dynamically, live at 60fps, it helps to know theses things and use them where optimization is needed.

The assignment operator := certainly signals in my mind that I want to replace the value of the variable with whatever is on the right side. I think someone designing a function should be aware of that and ensure that it is the case, if they are returning managed types. That being said, there may be cases where appending/modifying the Result variable is useful. I'd consider it obfuscated code, or a hack at best. However, I don't agree that Der schöne Günther's code above is unexpected behavior. It is exactly what I would expect reading the code. It may be puzzling at first but it is not a language or compiler flaw. The error was made by whoever wrote the code for the function. Still, I agree a compiler warning would be useful here.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/49060/2501336

Agreed that the compiler should let us know if we don't set Result in a function regardless of the result type.

The issue here is that Result does not come into scope as your function executes, it already came into scope before your function was called. (Thankfully, it also doesn't go out of scope when your function exits, or your caller would not be able to use the result!) So in this case, you should not have a code path that doesn't explicitly set the Result variable, since you don't know if your caller used the variable after it was initialized or not), but it's not a question of initialization.

There is no reason to initialize dynamic arrays or strings. If that is broken in the compiler you have bigger problems. For example, if you are forced to initialize a string to an empty string, then by definition you will end up freeing the invalid string. Better to figure out the actual cause of the problem.

In case you can't find someone who wants to do this for you, here is a good starting point on learning to do it yourself: http://www.rvelthuis.de/articles/articles-dlls.html http://www.rvelthuis.de/articles/articles-convert.html

It was required to accomplish the original RAD concept for Delphi. It is a dual-edged blade to be sure, but in this case, I will take the bugs that come with having an active IDE that actually runs the components. While you could guarantee that DLLs won't crash if you don't load them into the process (obviously), you aren't going to be able to reproduce all of that with another method, and I am not interested in the compromise.