Darian Miller

Instead of building separate executables, I suggest building one executable and leveraging feature toggles through licensing schemes or phone-home type methods

Best choice for me

Now there's a marketing line for FMX :o

It's true - and it the IDE stability issue has been pretty bad. Note that the question was a combination - best IDE stability and VCL win-32 development. In that context, I believe XE2's minor IDE quirks very much outweigh Delphi 2007's more limited dev capabilities. (+Generics, RTTI enhancements, Unicode support) If it's just IDE, then I pick Delphi 5. Super quick load time, no licensing quirks/worries.

Your question was "Is this type of construct smelly code?" If you ever feel compelled to ask that about a specific chunk of code, then I would the assert that the obvious answer is YES.

I believe Delphi XE2 was the best release for IDE stability and 32-bit VCL development.

No, that is apparently the main problem here. I installed a licensed commercial product from Embarcadero and was presented with a popup from the Java update stating that the license provided on the update is for non-commercial use only. I assume the version installed with Delphi was an older version and you are simply disallowed from updating it to the latest version unless you get a commercial license. My question was - did Embarcadero manage a commercial license which covers our use? I had assumed this topic was already discussed in length...but apparently not. I assume people are just ignoring that warning in the Java update screen.

(I've been coding in the automotive industry in the U.S. for 20+ years.) IMO, if you want to service the U.S. market and you are displaying the distance a vehicle has traveled to a user then use "Mileage" or "Miles" and convert KM to Miles for display. Very few in the U.S. will want to see KM for vehicle mileage (at least for personal vehicle mileage.)

CORRECT. The "time for docu work" was BEFORE THE FEATURE WAS RELEASED.

Clarity is certainly not one of his strong points.

You can rename the BPL but it's probably best to leave the BPLs alone and just mark them as disabled. see: https://wiert.me/2018/08/02/one-more-reason-to-disable-live-bindings-it-throws-exceptions-when-a-project-is-in-a-project-group/

Could be external in nature. If you have anti-virus running exclude the directories containing the .pas files (or enter a system-wide exclusion for *.pas, *.dpr, *.dproj) Otherwise check out IDE Fix Pack

Agreed. After being bought out last year by a PE firm, I can perceive their actions a little more clearly now. IMHO, there is no amount of bitching in this forum that is going to change their direction one bit.

I don't have 10.3 installed - so quick question on variables defined inline within a loop. I assume they uninitialized with each iteration, correct? (Or initialized exactly the same as normal stack variables) Technically then var AllocMsg :String := ''; in your example the null string default assignment is not needed? Also the variables TPQ and ArtSum are assumedly interfaces which are automatically released on each iteration?

Starting a new project from scratch - since FireDAC is now bundled with Delphi and it contains support for SQLite, are there any specific benefits for using LiteDAC (https://www.devart.com/litedac/), DISQLite3 (https://www.yunqa.de/delphi/products/sqlite3/index) or other alternatives?

That hit the nail on the head. I was missing that major issue. In addition, the last update to LiteDAC was November. A possible solution would be to dynamically link and keep that DLL up to date from the official source but I'd rather have statically linked. For future reference: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Rio/en/Connect_to_SQLite_database_(FireDAC) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34486325/how-to-remove-static-linking-from-firedac-sqlite https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23187853/delphi-sqlite-wrapper-with-static-linking-and-encryption-support/23193690 http://blog.synopse.info/post/2018/03/12/New-AES-based-SQLite3-encryption https://synopse.info/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=26794#p26794 In their Rio doc link above, they are using 3.9.2. I don't have 10.3 installed currently so I cannot confirm. It's been a number of years since I tried mORMot... time to dig into it again! Thanks

Clippy reference! Wow, that goes back a ways.. mid-90's?

You may want to check out: https://www.omnipascal.com/ https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=alefragnani.delphi-pack

Not a horrible idea for Embarcadero to consider internally... but they would need to invest a large amount of dev effort into it.

The product history page shows Delphi 2007 supported was added fairly recently in Version 8.1.0 Feb 11, 2016 https://www.peganza.com/history_pex.html And their online help says Delphi 2007 is supported: https://www.peganza.com/PEXHelp/index.html

A very simple comparison is: FixInsight offers some analysis for the code that you have open. SonarCube tracks entire projects over time. SonarCube also has quality gates for branches which you can allow check-ins or not based on code quality metrics. Many other features and plugins are available. I'd compare FixInsight to Pascal Expert (https://www.peganza.com/products_pex.html) Pascal Analyzer is Pascal Expert's much older brother with a ton more reporting options: https://www.peganza.com/products.html#PAL

Thanks - just ordered a new license of Nexus Quality Suite!

Check out the tools from Peganza: https://www.peganza.com/

Curious - what's the component?

For the few Delphi based web frameworks - how do they compare to this list? Might be interesting to get some submitted: http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/ Latest round 17 http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r17&hw=ph&test=fortune