Roger Cigol

Any computer science / electronic engineering students out there wondering what to do after garduating next summer?

Just to agree with everyone re: floating point use I point out that "1.025 sometimes stored as 1.025000001 or 1.0249999999" is an incorrect statement. This is how the numbers are DISPLAYED when converted to decimal. They are stored in BINARY floating point, typically based on the standard IEEE 754-1985 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-1985). Before everyone shouts: I know this is not the latest version of IEEE-754 - but linking to the 1985 version (which only discusses binary floating point) is easier when the discussion is limited to the Delphi (or C++) floating point types.

My tool bar customisations won't stay between different IDE restarts. eg. Add some extra buttons (using the tool bar customisation) and then close the IDE and restart and they are not there. This is very frustrating. I gather that this is a known issue but won't be fixed until 11.1. It's a major inconvenience (I am well behaved and resisting the very strong urge to shout).

Checking up on this it seems that #include <xxx.h> is recommended for including standard headers only. What are you trying to achieve by using this rather than the normal #include "xxx.h" syntax?

Strange: I don't get any characters - can you tell us what "characters" you get ?

A word of warning: there seems to be some issues with GooglTest framework and C++ in RAD Studio 11.0. I am working on this and will post news as and when it is available !

us C++ programmers have had this since the begining - it's very common to just use a pair { } and create a local variable that exists only for the extent of the braces

I'm not sure that I agree with this. The VCL IDE is not too tricky to get the hang of. I've spent my whole working life learning to program and am still finding there's lots more to learn. I guess it comes down to what you mean by "learning the language". It doesn't take long to learn to order two beers in a foreign language but that doesn't mean you can speak it..... Either way there's always more to learn - I'm just looking for someone who is interested in learning and good at learning.... Then I can help them on their way with interesting challenging but rewarding (both job satisfaction and financially) work....

But thinking about this further, if someone came along with good C++ skills and good person to person skills it would be easy for us to teach her/him how to work with VCL / FMX / FireDAC and the Embarcadero IDE....

Main projects use VCL. Minor projects use FireMonkey. Some projects use FireDAC. Some (albeit not complex) internal VCL components, all of which are in C++

Maybe a promising computer engineering graduate or post graduate. Must enjoy working with a diverse range of people and be a good listener (and understander!).

A very interesting perspective from Joseph. I wonder how this can be changed..... Listening (and responding) to customers is one of the key reasons I am still in business.

Well I'm a C++ MVP and active C++ user and I check this forum from time to time. If I can I do make the odd (hopefully) helpful comment. I also check Stack Overflow for questions tagged C++ Builder. Stack Overflow is a good place to post if you have a specific question. Here is the best place I can find for somewhat more imprecise (but still civilised and helpful) discussions. I too miss the old Embarcadero forums. I pushed as hard as I could to get Embarcadero to keep them. They were getting lots of public viewable negative feedback about some of their releases. I feel they should have used this as a low cost way of learning what they needed to concentrate on improving. But it seems that rather than fixing the problems that were annoying their customers their marketing dept. insisted that they close the mechanism of reporting down. They do have good products and they do have a good marketing team - but they do need to make sure that they listen to their customers and respond effectively to what they are not doing well. By closing their forum they lost an opportunity to do this.....

The link for a RAD Studio 11 preview is Desktopfirst summit - rad studio 11 preview

Any one working on their own or part of a small s/w development team independant partnership? This could work just as well as us actually employing someone....

The flakey code completion is, as you say, a huge hindrance. Embarcadero are aware of this, hopefully it will be better in the coming version (11) (although community edition releases usually lag behind the subscription license versions a bit). Your comment about missing things in the structure viewer is puzzling though. It's a bit of a vague description. Can you be more precise and/or post a screen shot or two?

Experience with Linux would be a bonus....

I have now got googletest framework up and running with a Windows VCL clang64 project. I've posted two blogs about this here: https://cigolblog.wordpress.com/2021/07/16/tips-for-using-googletests-with-embarcadero-clang64-for-windows-vcl-projects/

I too have had a look : and yes it does seem to work and have a lot of the old stuff - so thanks to Jim for getting this running and pointing us to it. I have spent ten minutes puzzling over the ordering of the "Latest Changes on this Web Site" items at the home page: Code news fast home page and would welcome anyone's guess on this !

I'm working on a new PostgreSQL project. This requires a Win 64 bit (VCL) C++ FireDAC application. This forces me to ditch DUnit (some more experiments with some starting code suggest DUnit tests compile ok but when you come to run them under clang64 they don't appear in the test tree (the main test files do appear, but the individual tests are missing) and so the green arrow "run tests" is greyed. Out. Using 10.4.2 I used the gettit package manager to install GoogleTests - this downloaded without errors. It put it all in somewhere I might not have chosen (but since it's all source code I can probably moved this) However I have got the sample test sample8_unittest.exe that is one of the samples that comes as part of the getit install to compile and run using clang32 and clang64. But it doesn't have the nice GUI front end that DUnit tests have. Next: Does anyone know of a GUI front end that is compatible with Embarcadero C++ Builder? Next (for me) : I need to see if I can get some unit tests of my 64 bit app to run.......

There is an on going discussion on Stack overflow about using C++ Builder and TPrinter - most of the time it works. Just occasionally it gives an error. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67233197/cbuilder-printing-issues-on-certain-printers?noredirect=1#comment120336791_67233197 I wonder if any Delphi VCL users have had the same issue (since TPrinter is a delphi class wrapper for the Windows printer API) ?

Note: " Just occasionally it gives an error." - means on certain combinations of Windows machines and different printer drivers. ie the same bit of s/w works fine 99.9% of the time and then just the odd user has an issue. In my experience changing the printer driver "with a bit of luck" fixes the issue - this statement itself indicates how flakey it appears to be!

10.4.2 is known to have all sorts of negative issues on the clang debugging experience (both 32 and 64 bit). We are promised that 10.5 will be much better..... 10.5 is hopefully not too far away (although no information other than a fairly old road map is available on this).

what happens if you replace MYBOOL with bool and PRICER_DEVEX and PRICER_STEEPSTEDGE with plain integer constants (eg 2 or 3 or 4....) ? If you get the same problem then this would be a more helpful form to post your problem source code (since your quoted code does not include definitions of these block capital items). Or, if it starts working, can you include the definitions we need to get the code to be like yours (in this case it could be that MYBOOL is being defined differently in the debug and release compilations for example....)

The sort of question that would be kicked out of Stack Overflow: I am about to embark on a new database project for a customer: Maybe 200,000 records per year in the main table. Typically ten or fifteen users accessing database simultaneously. Running on a server on a local network (possibly move to cloud in the future). Interface to C++ Builder code using FireDAC. All running on Windows platforms. Only for internal use by the customer (not for re-sale) so can use MySQL under GPL. I'm finding it really hard to choose between MySQL and PostgreSQL. Any ideas on strengths /weaknesses I should look at whilst trying to make this decision?