Darian Miller

10.4 FireDAC users note a new blog post from Marco: https://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2020-july-firedac-transaction-configuration-rad104.html

I don't think there's anything inherently broken in the setup. I have similar hardware specs and 15.5.5 and do not experience the issue. A couple generic things I typically look at for performance issues: - First step is to ensure VMWare Tools is up to date. - Ensure your AntiVirus type tools on the host machine are excluding the directory of the Virtual Machine files - Right click the VM in the library and select SnapShot->SnapShot Manager. Performance really degrades as snapshots pile up...perhaps make a full clone and try it without any snapshots if you have more than a couple snapshots. - Edit the VM settings, click on the drive(s) and select Defragment for each. - Within the VM ensure anti-virus type tools are excluding your source file directory - Run Task Manager/Resource Monitor and look for CPU/Disk hogs on the host and inside the VM. (Windows Search is a typical culprit) If you have IDE Experts loaded, I'd look at disabling those one at a time to test for conflict. Up until yesterday, I did have the LSP-Based CodeInsight disabled...maybe try disabling that temporarily to test. (Tools->Options->User Interface->Editor->Source->Delphi source type->Code Insight->Code insight manager: change to "Delphi (Classic Code Insight)") +Ensure latest IDE patches are installed.

Works from the central U.S.

Lots of info on: https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/

I think the Community Edition is still very cool...but the powers to be are apparently getting nervous about it stealing too much from their cash cow so they plan on delaying 10.4 CE for months. To me, you either want a bunch of new developers, or you don't. It takes some cojones to stick to a plan. My guess is that once their lawyers figure out how to further complicate the CE user agreement, 10.4 CE will probably be released with a few additional feature limitations. Hopefully they don't get too over-zealous and self-defeat their own plan.

I think there is a little more buzz today than, say, 5 years ago. The mobile offering is getting better so I see some new devs trying to produce apps. To provide something measurable, I've added more than 1,000 new connections on LinkedIn within the last 6 months, almost all Delphi developers or related. I've asked for many of those connections, and posted on my blog asking for people to reach out to me which has generated quite a few inbound requests. That's not necessarily 'buzz' in the general marketplace but it does show me that there still is some interest in Delphi. I've also been playing around with a blog on occasion and it's had a little activity. I did 'Get Excited' with 10.4 and I thought it had the potential to be a really cool new version. Unfortunately, their internal testing seems to be seriously lacking (or perhaps the people making the decision to 'ship it' are not listening to those that know better.) I offered to help provide/debug test suites for their PPL but they resisted due to IP concerns. I did publish a few tests on GitHub and one test sparked a conversation here which hopefully has led to a much needed fix in 10.4.1. (Thanks to those that did the hard work, mainly Pyscripter and Anders Melander) Perhaps we as a commuity revisit the community-powered RTL test suite that Nick Hodges started years ago? From what I remember, one problem that derailed the last attempt was the desire to test old versions which complicated matters. Is anyone else interested in participating? Or perhaps a better first question: does anyone already have some RTL/VCL/FMX type tests that they would be willing to contribute to a public GitHub repo? I'd be willing to do much of the initial leg work behind the project. I think it would ramp up quickly if we just combined a set of currently available tests. (I'm assuming that I'm not the only one that generates a few tests for RTL hotspots.) This would include existing projects that reproduce existing quality portal items that could probably be converted into a unit test. If interested, zip up the projects and send me what you'd like to contribute: darian@ideasawakened.com and I'll get them added to https://github.com/ideasawakened/DelphiKB/tree/master/Delphi Tests/Source Or, create your own RTL/VCL/FMX test repo and post a link.

There are plenty of historical examples of Venture Capital/Private Equity takeovers in the software industry. I would assume five main reasons an investment company buys a software company: #1: Expand an under-funded company to get exponential growth. (Pour cash in to reap future rewards at a high return.) #2: Replace key management to yield better results with the same base. (Also seen as 'take it to the next level' as the original owner is incapable.) #3: Merge existing companies to scale out / share similar resources to yield a higher combined bottom line. (one HR group handling multiple companies, joint purchasing power to reduce costs...) #4: Buy and keep it afloat with 'streamlined operations'. (basically kill as much payroll and overhead as possible to keep it running and pocket the monthly recurring revenue at a much higher return due to the cost cutting.) #5: Merge technology from multiple companies to provide a new industry-changing offering. (Assumes greater worth together than apart. Cox/Dealer Track, Vista/DealerSocket are two large software company examples in the auto industry.) Which of the 5 does Embarcadero best fall into since Idera purchased them in fourth quarter 2015? Idera itself was purchased by private equity in 2014. And another PE firm took over in first quarter of 2017. Since then, they have went on a bit of a purchasing spree: Sencha, AquaFold, Ranorex, Whole Tomato, Froala, Lansa, Webyog, Travis CI, Fusion Charts... We are seeing a tiny benefit with the ancient customer portal being partially redone in Sencha. But it's a project taking many months with no end in sight with very few progress reports (so it seems to actually be a 'would appear cool to dogfood our own tools' type project with no real financial support.) We do see AquaFold now included in the Architect Edition...which seems to be a much better option than the previous offering from Idera. But look at what was purchased, including RAD Studio, and consider possible reasons for these purchases. They could be combining resources of all of these companies...something they wouldn't really announce and we wouldn't neccessarily see. They do not appear to be plowing additional cash into any of these companies to accelerate growth. So unless they have some master plan on providing an industry-changing/Visual Studio Killer project that integrates much of this technology, the general trend of each of these seems to be #4. But we really don't have any insight into their grand strategy so this is all speculation. We do have the knowledge of the previous cuts in their R&D staff with acknowledgement that they are using more lower-cost contractors instead (also easily seen in some of the new code being generated.) On the other hand, they currently state that they "invest nearly 2x the industry average in R&D as a percentage of sales" All I hope for is that Delphi continues as long as possible. I don't expect some magic re-awakening where Delphi takes a significant market share. I expect it to be hard to kill as there is just so much code out there. I also expect to see some eventual growth given all the time wasted on other new technology that needs rewritten every 9-12 months. I also expect some sort of patch/update for 10.4 very soon. I was a 10.4 fan-boy extreme but I've turned off the LSP-based Code Insight as it's just often annoyingly wrong. There were 85 days between 10.3 and 10.3.1 with 3 patches in between. We're at 50 days since release of 10.4 with one minor installer patch. I hope it's not 30+ more days before some of these major problems in 10.4 are addressed.

Nice. Is there a specific list of fixes you offer for 10.4 VCL Styles?

It looks nice. Do you include any specific fixes for VCL Styling in 10.4?

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I'm currently in the same situation of looking at the SynEdit-2 vs SynEdit. I originally picked SynEdit-2 by Pyscripter due to his changes, but am now using the github/SynEdit version due to Gutter.ShowModification support. Do you have your customizations on GitHub somewhere? The word wrap issue (assuming: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54494905/how-to-make-tsynedits-wordwrap-same-as-tmemos) is a problem in all 3 of the projects. I haven't checked out the FPC version yet. Have you tried a pull request of your modifications to either SynEdit or SynEdit-2?

https://quality.embarcadero.com/browse/RSP-29639 var c1,c2,c3:Char; p:PChar; begin c1 := 'A'; p := PChar(c1); showmessage(p^); //10.3.3 Access Violation. 10.4 "A" c2 := Char(p); showmessage(c2); //10.3.3 "A" 10.4 Not "A" c3:= 'B'; p := Addr(c3); showmessage(p^); //10.3.3 + 10.4: "B" end;

I haven't seen any lock ups or AV's on 10.4. Maybe it's your environment / third party controls / add-ins.. do you have any IDE Experts installed? My problem with 10.4 is Code Insight. It's awesome when it works, but it falls apart over time.

For what it's worth, setting the VCL style in the DPR before the forms are created does seem to help with flicker (if you aren't already doing that.)

+1 now up to 58

This is fantastic! Thank you.

I agree! I had switched to QP to type up a new issue and thought the same thing. When I closed that window, this window beeped with your reply - must be good karma!

I've seen multiple cases of a timeout of 200ms returning in 160ms when running within VMWare. My first stress test included a fudge factor for returning too early just for that reason.

A new Quality Portal issue could be raised to ensure that the timeout values of the queue are >= 16ms. Anything less is apparently not achievable based on earlier comments in this thread.

1. Windows 10 build 18363. i7-7700K 4.2GHz, 4 cores, 8 logical processors, 64GB RAM. 2. pyscripter explained why a low pop timeout fails earlier in this thread and is why there's a minimum of 20ms in the stress tester now. The test originally failed less in a virtual environment (VMWare Workstation) so I switched to testing on physical machine. On Win32, you can try throwing more threads and run into problems, likely more with Windows than Delphi. I tested with 1,000 threads without any issue. Win64 could handle 50,000 threads without failing.

Two stress tests just completed without error after running for 24 hours straight: Win32 and Win64 running 1,000 threads each with a 20ms timeout with your latest MonitorWaitStackFix.pas.

I updated the GitHub repo with your changes and am running two more day-long tests (win32+win64) both with 1,000 threads and 20ms pop-timeout on Windows 10 physical machine. My last 24-hour Win32 stress test completed without failure. https://github.com/ideasawakened/DelphiKB/commits/master/Delphi Tests/Source/rtl/common/System.Generics.Collections/TThreadedQueue/StressTestPopItem

Is there a way to import the old versions into the ELC database? I just started this ELC hosted license for 10.3 but I should have access to the previous versions but they aren't available in my registered downloads and they don't show up in ELC. I can probably manually find/download the ISO in CodeCentral but the updates are in the MyRegisteredDownloads...not sure how a network license user is supposed to properly handle old versions and I've tried the official support channel twice. Thanks for any help!

Thanks! It works...but doesn't show 10.4 Sydney, rather still 10.3 Rio. Is that normal?

There's always hope for 10.4.1!