Darian Miller

I believe many people prefer native desktop applications to the typical bloat of a web application. There are some exceptions, and I am an older guy with heavy bias, but I would pay double for a native desktop application over a browser based application for just about anything. If I wanted to use it on my phone, I'd take a scaled down version, targeted with features needed to be available on-the-go.

Introducing the first RAD Programmer Coding Challenge! Check the blog post for details. https://ideasawakened.com/post/rad-programmer-challenge-number-1-minesweeper-game-build

The first official entry into the challenge - please give him a star on GitHub! https://github.com/davidreed1666/davidreed @vhanla please finish your entry by adding your link to the GitHub discussion thread.

Congrats! You got two stars on your repo already. Don't forget to follow the rules and add a note to that discussion channel. Include your BTC public address for the potential receipt of tips.

There was a couple questions asked, but I haven't heard much. We'll see how many end up submiting a game. Maybe Marco's 25 year old game will win. 🙂 I plan on doing at least a few of these if there is some participation. These are some ideas for future projects - I welcome any suggestions: - AI ChatBot is the next-up - Specific GitHub build actions to help automate CI tasks for Delphi - VS Code add-ons - Perhaps a couple NVidia-CUDA library focused projects - Game Dev, AI, HPC, Video/Image Processing - Debug Visualizers of various types and other ToolsAPI based projects - Cross Platform Logging Framework (there's a few good ones already) I have some more surprises that I've been working on. One project turned out to be much, much bigger than I thought. We'll see what happens. I want to generate more traffic on social media and GitHub. In general, it seems like Delphi devs are way too quiet online. Yes, there are probably a lot fewer Delphi developers than we hope for, but I know the majority out there aren't actively increasing the visibility of Delphi online. Maybe we are just mostly old-farts who play solitaire on our computer in our off-times... More likely is we're busy at work and don't have time for vibe coding nonsense. 🙂

Thanks - I just joined that group

Sure - you may be the only entry so it could be an easy $500! LOL

Can you create a QP issue for this finding? It may help fix some outstanding issues...

I don't recall hearing that.. that sounds ominous to me. I wonder how long will it take to fix the completely new approach. But it's obvious the current approach isn't working as it's still pretty flaky after 5 years of trying.

AI chat is another tool in your toolbox that you can use, or choose not to. From my informal testing, the "best" right now for Delphi seems to be https://claude.ai/ I think we're nearing a point where local/private LLMs will become much more powerful and affordable.. you will train your AI tooling on your entire codebase, your help files, complete ticket system history, and specific industry knowledge sets so your LLM will be much more contextual. The companies that leverage this highly customized tooling may have an distinct advantage over those than do not. It's still going to be hard to beat the creative genius of a motivated mind, but even as those brand new ideas come to market, eventually the same leverage will be used to saturate the market quicker (so the large coprorations will eat up the small ones faster than they already do.) On the other hand, large corporations will continue to waste so much valuable time on micro-managing the creative types leaving gaps open for their eventual downfall. (Wishful thinking given the gigantic cash reserves of large corporations today.)

One step further... I worked with a Delphi developer who rarely used Free, and tried to only use Destroy. Everyone seems to have an opinion on Free vs FreeAndNil but he was the only one that ever went further and said Destroy vs Free. Some of the same arguments could be had for using Destroy vs Free. (But I still use .Free)

It is very likely that whatever decision you make now, you will adjust as you get more experience. This is a topic without a true correct answer... it simply depends. If you want to be strict and always follow a single rule - then use FreeAndNill all the time. After a while, you will wonder why you are doing that and you can revisit after you have some code in place. For me, I only rarely use FreeAndNil - only when it is part of the normal logic that instance again could/will be read in the future and that I will need to know it's correct state. (For example, treat nil as a special 'done' or 'not yet started' type flag.)

Can you provide a source for that?

Also read suggestions from Marco Cantu https://blog.marcocantu.com/blog/2022-december-suggestions-help-delphi-compiler.html

Do you have any plans on releasing that plug-in?

Hopefully your fix count going down over time. What's your feeling there...is it getting slowly better? Have you published your latest fixes anywhere?

+1 for 32-bit apps in a global commercial environment that is a very long way away from deprecating 32-bit applications. Just think of how many developers are still using Delphi 7 on a daily basis. There are still major Turbo Pascal line-of-business applications being supported. Put that up there with IP4 being completely replaced very soon, or this is finally "The Year of Desktop on Linux", or the WEF will peacefully achieve its global governance goals and the world's citizens will all be happy.

I posted a blog article on this topic yesterday: https://www.ideasawakened.com/post/name-your-threads-even-the-ones-auto-created-by-delphi I'm curious how many others do this sort of thing. I think it really comes in handy sometimes. I also went looking for the reasons behind each of the Delphi-created threads, other than the main message loop. Do you have any info on that? I could swear I read an article on it years ago, but couldn't find it.

I was playing with a little threading project tonight and I did a quick update on this unit to add a delay similar to what you suggested. (Now also call Get/SetThreadDescription if available) https://github.com/ideasawakened/iaLib/blob/master/Source/iaRTL.NameDelphiThreads.Windows.pas

See some notes here for issues with 12.2: https://github.com/ideasawakened/DelphiKB/wiki/D29.ATHENS.12.2.0.0 I haven't updated the wiki yet for the 2 patches for 12.2 One reason to upgrade is Smart Codeinsight

This is probably the better choice: https://www.delphitools.info/dwscript/

This one has a long history: https://github.com/remobjects/pascalscript

In a codegen project I am working on, I am importing an API and creating the Delphi code to utilize it. I prefer working with records so most of the codegen is creating record types for the request/response objects exposed by the API. However, about 5% or less of this large API types involve circular references between types. I tried a few different approaches and couldn't come up with a decent solution with records so I starting to use forward declaration with classes, at least for this 5%. That seems to work, but now I think I need to make all the types classes instead of having a mixture. I ventured into Variants and even implemented my own custom type via TInvokeableVariantType to get some properties defined but generic variant custom record types don't work. It was a cool side trek but didn't solve this problem. After stewing on this for a while, I thought I'd ask for any feedback. Would you prefer a large API with 95% simple records and some occasional class-based request/responses due to a funky API design, or would you want to see it consistent throughout and only use classes? Or would you implement an alternative approach? TRecordA = record Field1:Integer; Field2:TRecordB; Field3:string; TopX:TRecordC; end; TRecordB = record Field4:Integer; Field5:TRecordA; end; TRecordC = record Items:TArray<TRecordA>; end;

See: https://www.embarcadero.com/support Premium Update Subscription support includes "Regular online meetings with the product team and individual company roadmap sessions" I am curious if anyone has purchased Premium Update Subscription and has received roadmap sessions... They have said in the past that if you are an active subscriber that you can privately ask about roadmap issues (nad not necessarily requiring Premium support.)

If you purchased 11 but your subscription ran out after 11.1 was released but before 11.2 was released, you could only use 11.1 even though 11.2 is another update to 11. I assume you should be able to download 11.1 in that scenario but accessing installers after your subscription runs out is a murky area to me. I believe they allow you to access the download portal only if you have an active subscription - so it's up to you to ensure that you download the installers you need and keep local copies before your subscription runs out. (Since you aren't paying them anything for ongoing support, you would be expecting lifetime free access to that large database of installers that they maintain - which seems like a valid argument from their side. On the flip side, bandwidth is pretty cheap these days and they are already hosting it for paying customers...) Alternatively, while you have an active subscription, you should at least keep a copy of their public download links so you can download them later as needed (for example, keep this link for the 10.4 ISO image: https://altd.embarcadero.com/download/radstudio/10.4/RADStudio-1042-4203.iso) Of course, they could change those download links in the future so it's best to keep local copies if you are not maintaining an active subscription. The best solution is to always keep your subscription active and up to date. It benefits the entire community by keeping your subscription current.