Delphi 12.3 is available

[Darian Miller 374]

41 minutes ago, Brandon Staggs said:

they have also said during the release webinar that they are aware LSP doesn't work acceptably and will be replacing the current system with a completely new approach in 13

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.

[dummzeuch 1586]

2 hours ago, Sherlock said:

There are always remote connection possibilities as a compromise. I firmly believe an unfixed product can cost more than a trip for two guys, that know their stuff, to find out what the hell is going on.

Other companies (e.g. Steema (TeeChart)) have offered me remote assistance via TeamViewer (their choice, not mine) with a compilation / installation problem.

 

Embarcadero could do something similar at least for customers with subscription and "Platinum support" to track down this annoying problem.

We do not have Platinum support, but if we had and could reproduce this problem reliably, I would insist on something like this. Embarcadero is always bragging that they have some large enterprise customers. Customers like this should be able to pressure them to get their act together.

Edited Wednesday at 03:47 PM by dummzeuch

[ToddFrankson 6]

40 minutes ago, Darian Miller said:

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.

Me Either.   

[Brandon Staggs 357]

2 hours ago, Darian Miller said:

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.

 

2 hours ago, ToddFrankson said:

Me Either.   

Edit: as was pointed out by someone else, this non-native speaker may not mean what I mean by "new architecture." But here's what I was referring to:

 

 

42 minute mark. Listen carefully where he says there will be a "new architecture" in the next major release.

 

Edited Wednesday at 06:13 PM by Brandon Staggs

[Uwe Raabe 2123]

The actual wording is:

Quote

I would like to say that the LSP quality is not yet where we wanted it to be, especially for customer with large code bases, but on the next release we will tackle this problem from a different angle and we will try a new architecture to solve some of the issues that our customers with large code bases are facing and we hope that it will bring better stability and quality overall.

If that means replacing the current system with a completely new approach is debatable.

[Brandon Staggs 357]

11 minutes ago, Uwe Raabe said:

If that means replacing the current system with a completely new approach is debatable.

That's fair. In my mind, when we start talking about a "new architecture," we go beyond fixing bugs in a system to using a new approach. But it could be that I am misunderstanding what is intended by the statement "new architecture." Though one wonders why this "new architecture" requires waiting for a breaking release. The impression I was left with, after watching that segment of the video three times in a row, was that they know full-well that LSP is still very broken and requires a redesign and they are waiting for a major release rather than fixing the thing in 12.1 or 12.2 or now 12.3. 

 

I watched the webinar live and tried to ask a follow-up question about LSP fixes and again felt as though they were saying big changes coming in 13, but that is just an impression and the Q&A is not available in the YouTube post.

 

Too bad we don't have something like a road map to clarify things for us.

Edited Wednesday at 05:13 PM by Brandon Staggs

[dummzeuch 1586]

Just now, Brandon Staggs said:

That's fair. In my mind, when we start talking about a "new architecture," we go beyond fixing bugs in a system to using a new approach. But it could be that I am misunderstanding what is intended by the statement "new architecture."

That's the problem when talking to non native speakers. They might use words that in their mind mean something very different than in yours. I've definitely been there and done that.

[Mark NZ 8]

14 hours ago, David Heffernan said:

It feels like most releases in the past 5-10 years have been "quality focused" releases. In other words, they are already doing this. How is it going? 

They say that but in my opinion it doesn't appear to have good practical results, yes they do have fixes but there are LOTS of outstanding issues that really annoy people and the bugs have been increasing at a  substantially faster rate than are fixed for many years- it was really telling viewing the raised vs resolved Jira graphs on the old quality portal.  It was also pretty bad seeing the number of "resolved/fixed" bugs that were simply closed because Embarcadero couldn't reproduce while customers were still reporting they were a problem.  Additionally a number of their "fixes" don't properly fix the problem or introduce new bugs.  From the outside it appears like they don't have much in the way of development resources, especially experienced ones that know the code really well. 

[Brandon Staggs 357]

9 hours ago, dummzeuch said:

Oddly enough code completion stopped working for me on a large project in Delphi 10.2 while it works fine in Delphi 2007 and Delphi 12.2 and now 12.3. So it depends on the project in question.

I went ahead and installed 12.3 in a VM to see if LSP would work properly in our large code base. It actually seemed worse -- I had 12.2 open in one and 12.3 open in another and Find Declaration was working better in 12.2 (that is to say, on the same symbol, I could get to the declaration in 12.2 when I couldn't in 12.3). That isn't saying much though -- they both fail to work most of the time, and both of them will consistently open the wrong source file if the declaration exists in a forked FMX/VCL/RTL unit.

 

I suspect in our case the forked units are probably causing LSP to trip up. We have fixed numerous problems in FMX in particular and have no choice but to maintain our own copies of these units. They appear in the search path properly and compile correctly, but using the stack trace or find declaration in these typically opens the wrong source file (going to the BDS source folder instead of our local copies). I have experimented with the browsing and search paths to no avail. Even though the compiler uses the correct unit, the IDE just can't seem to cope, and I suspect that incompatibilities are messing up LSP, but I have no way to know for sure. What's really funny is that sometimes CTRL+Click will take me to the BDS source file on the wrong line but CTRL+G will take me to the (correct) local copy. Usually neither work at all though.

[FredS 138]

3 hours ago, Brandon Staggs said:

if LSP would work properly in our large code base. It actually seemed worse

Seemed fine on a smaller section of code base but the same code base in the new 64-bit preview was a disaster..

[Mark NZ 8]

14 hours ago, Patrick PREMARTIN said:

You are a developer, can you give us your magic method to fix unreproducible bugs ?

They added LSP logging which could be turned on for tracking down bugs they couldn't reproduce (similar to what we do at times for knarly customer bugs that we can't reproduce), turned it on, gave them the logs, from memory no related fixes were forthcoming.  I've also looked at their general source base (eg VCL) given them the bug and the fix and not had them actioned 😞

[Brandon Staggs 357]

14 hours ago, FredS said:

Seemed fine on a smaller section of code base but the same code base in the new 64-bit preview was a disaster..

A non-starter for us, as the 64-bit LSP Server only supports Windows targets.

[Brandon Staggs 357]

20 hours ago, dummzeuch said:

That's the problem when talking to non native speakers. They might use words that in their mind mean something very different than in yours. I've definitely been there and done that.

In a recent post, Marco said much the same thing as was said in the Webinar:

 

https://embt.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1/RSS-1887

 

 

My original inference that they are starting over with a new approach seems correct in light of this. Here we have "back to the drawing board" and "architecture" in the same sentence. Surely Marco knows how this will be interpreted.