FreeDelphiPascal

I mean the time from when I press the Close button in my program (empty application, no buttons, no nothing inside) until the IDE restores itself and I can type in.

My 12 years old CPU was an AMD FX-8350 which has a raw performance superior to i5. https://versus.com/en/amd-fx-8350-vs-intel-core-i5-7440hq > The RAM will also make a difference. I have a 45% of RAM free. > If I was you I would spend my effort on fixing your old system. I would like to repair my old rig but the mainboard (gigabyte ga-990fxa-ud3) died. TWICE! The first mainboard will not POST. Then I purchased a second hand mainboard (the same model) one year ago and it went belly up exactly the same way!!! Looks like it reached a certain age and the bios parts started to degrade in the same way. I did a Windows restart and now the shutdown of the program under the debugger/IDE is only 2 seconds. Windows 11 was running for 178 hours! I think I got to much used with Windows 7, which I would use for months without these issues 😞 So, it was a Windows problem. The smaller CPU would explain the remaining 2 seconds needed for the IDE to shutdown the program and show itself. Conclusion Laptops are always a joke compared with desktops. That's settled 🙂 So, now I am in the biggest dilemma: buy new laptop (portability) or build a brand new desktop PC (power)?

YES. Now, since I moved to Win10, I have that too. So, are you on Win 7 or higher? If you are on a higher Windows, them it must be the OS that is doing that, since my old Delphi 10.4 was not doing that at all on Win7. Win10 is so crappy that MS gave it for free for years and people were still not switching to it. They had to retire Win7 in order to force people switch to 10.

I tried Cursor this week. The program is still early beta. Realy early beta. Strange things are happening there. But when it would be ready, for non Delphi programmers (those HTML/JS coders without a true IDE), it is promising. In some cases it will output good ideas/code, in other cases, absolutely monumental garbage, like TListBox.Items[0].Visible:= false; (wishful thinking?) In the end I the time spent on garbage equalized the time when it produced good code/ideas. I think it would be rather useful to produce ideas instead of code. But considering that you need to understand and review other's code.... I ended up with a negative score. But the end conclusion is that unless it is integrated into Delphi IDE it will not help a well seasoned Delphi programmer. It will rather disturb you. I am not even mentioning, that you can only use it on PAS files that have no DFM associated since Cursor cannot edit your DFM files!

I have found these 3 plugins for "chat": https://github.com/AliDehbansiahkarbon/ChatGPTWizard/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/Code4Delphi/Delphi-AI-Developer https://github.com/FMXExpress/CodeDroidAI But none has a level of integration similar to Copilot. _____ This is not a plugin but just a guy that says that Copilot can generate Delphi code:

That article only mentions Visual Studio Code. Probalby was changed???

I expected that the transition to AI will be a bit more gradual, but it seems, Devin is already able to create a full application from a prompt. And I mean the proper way, not ChatGPT style.... So, all kind of questions are coming to my mind. For example, since we know that Microsoft is using GitHub to train its AI, for which later I will have to pay a shitload of money to use it, should I retract my projects from GitHub? Also, what is Embarcadero doing to stay on top? Will we continue to write code line by line in Delphi IDE, while other programmers will have no IDE anymore but a small chat box where they can enter a prompt? Since Devin will cost a load of money, how will independent developers (and even small companies) be able to compete? Will we all work for megacorporations that afford to buy the AI?

I hope (at least in EU) they will introduce some regulations around AIs.

I assure you, Copilot is doing a lot more than that !!!!!!

I am not talking about building their own AI, but IDE-AI integration as copilot...

I agree. There are way more 32bit apps out there than 64bit.

Come on David, you know it worth trading the "less convenient" way of programming in Delphi, for the speed we get from a Delphi program. I won't even dare to put Python in the same speed chart as Delphi.... 🙂

DDevExt also has this capability https://github.com/ahausladen/DDevExtensions

DDevExt also has this capability https://github.com/ahausladen/DDevExtensions

Sometimes Ctrl+Click simply won't work. It is probably related to this setting.

A solid question! I don't know all the languages out there, but Java and C# (which are more memory safe than Delphi because of their GC), loose quite a bit of speed because they have to spend some time to check the GC and decide what to clean up (release). EVEN if they would spend very little on this task, they have to "stop the world" from time to time. There is no way to use such a language in time-critical systems (I worked on such a system in the past). Therefore, these safer languages, have to pay a price for their safety. I am curious if there is any language out there that is as fast as Delphi and more memory safe. From what I heard, Rust is not using a GC, while still being fast and safe. I would like to see some speed comparison between Delphi and Rust. I heard that its speed is only slightly smaller than C++'s speed (and from here we can extrapolate to Delphi's speed). But its compilation time is even higher than C++ compilation time, which compared to Delphi... well... we all know how ridiculous C++ is at this chapter. 🙂 Also, Rust cannot do GUI natively, like Delphi. So, you cannot even compare Delphi and Rust at this chapter. In Rust, you must opt for GTK, QT (ha ha ha) or do some web-based GUIs - with all their known drawbacks. So, I would say, Rust is more oriented towards "systems" (DB, servers, automations, embedded systems, robots, etc.) not towards desktop apps. So, as you Lars said, I would like to see a language that is memory safe and executes fast, and compiles fast and comes with 500 visual components out of the box. __________ Note: Note: When I say Delphi is safe, I assume that the programmer played safe and didn't abuse the pointers and didn’t override Delphi’s strong typing system. I worked on a system that look like it was written by a C programmer. Procedures like DoSomething(var P); all over the place, and half of the parameters passed are raw pointers. But as somebody said above, give a bold programmer a safe language, and it would find a way to abuse it. It would take a bit more creativity than in Delphi which puts the pointers (almost directly) on the table, but sure you can screw up in the end.

But aren't you supposed in the end to put the PixelFormat to pf8???? I need the final image as pf8. But if I set its PixelFormat to pf8, some wavy patterns appear in it (like when you convert a high color image to 256 color GIF)

I have seen nasty sh*t in my life. So, I am totally for this!

Yes. I totally understand and agree with that. Because of this, I went in my post above, and I changed the word "error" with "issue", to eliminate any interpretation. I like to be pedantic 🙂

LLVM is not quite a programming language. So, you are right in a way: you could recover at the hardware level, but LLVM fails to do so. But then, let's not blame Delphi language itself for this. So, I would correct myself and say that the issue is between the hardware and the language, in the LLVM. Do you agree with this "technicality"? 🙂

I don't think you read Dalija's article. It clearly states that it is hardware related, not language related.

Nice post David S! I had recently to fix a bug in a program that was sending wrong financial reports to a governmental financial institution (equivalent to RSI in America) for 18 years. After 18 years, somebody observed the problem. It ended up that there was not only one bug, like 15. Nobody ever observed the other 14 instances where data was wrong. I was told to shut up and move on. Also, nobody cared that my new program was running 100x faster than the previous one. I told them that probably there were another 100 bugs in there (pascal-like code, no objects, thousands of warnings and hints - at least, there were no pointers!). They wouldn't let me rewrite the program. They said, it now it works, let it as it is. So people, don't blame Delphi for not being totally memory-safe. It is mostly the programmer that dictates the safety of a language. I guess the programmer that wrote that program in Delphi would be able to sneak in some calamities like this also in a language like Rust. __________ Also, many people complained about buffer overflow here. Turn on the damn Range and Overflow checking. It will catch a good bunch of those overflows - unless the devil thought you to use pointers all over the place.

When have you ever called one of those constructors?

Too much useless talk about this topic. But this guy (Kas Ob) came with real ideas/solutions. Great job Kas!

obj := TObject.Create; FreeAndNil(obj); FreeAndNil(obj); ------------------------------ On SO somebody wrote an example like this to prove how unsafe Delphi is: s: String; i: Integer; begin s:= 'four'; for i:= 1 to 1138 do begin write( s[i] ); // What will it access after i=4? end; end; At one point, we should stop talking about how safe the programming language is and start talking about how "unsafe" is the programmer 🙂 🙂