Tag - CrossPlatform

2010, Saturday August 14

FPC and Delphi: toward a "fratricidal war"?

By A.Bouchez on 2010, Saturday August 14, 10:28 - Pascal Programing

Speaking about [upcoming] 64 bit Delphi compiler, I did forecast they will surely release their compiler 5 years later than FPC's... hoping they will follow the FPC way, just as Intel did about 64 bits instructions, against AMD.

What I was referring to is that AMD was the first to publish a 64 bit x86 CPU, with a new instruction set. Intel released somewhat later their own 64 bit x86 CPU, following the same instruction set.
There are some variants between AMD and Intel CPU, some dedicated instructions or implementations.
But most instruction set is perfectly compatible.

And I suspect the more it gets, the less compatible FPC and Delphi will be.

The main difference between Delphi and FPC is that the first is a business company project (Embarcadero), the second an Open Source solution. They are not two billions dollars companies fighting each other, with some state-level institutions watching about any unfair competition or monopoly... FPC compiler is technically a great and robust project, but EMB follows business rules. I don't think anyone will play "Anti-monopoly" in favor of FPC.

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2010, Tuesday August 10

Writing Delphi code for 64 bits compiler

By A.Bouchez on 2010, Tuesday August 10, 09:19 - Pascal Programing

There will be an upcoming 64 bits Delphi compiler. Embarcadero promised it.

Florian (the architect of FPC) showed a first "Hello world" program for Win64 in March 2006.
This was remarkable since GCC and the binutils don't even support this target at this time.
In fact, FPC used its Internal linker on Win32 and Win64 platforms, just like Delphi does.

Here are some points on how you could make your code ready to compile under FPC 64 bits, therefore (I hope) under future Delphi 64 bits compiler.

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2010, Friday August 6

Save object, stop class hegemony!

By A.Bouchez on 2010, Friday August 6, 11:31 - Pascal Programing

In a recent thread in the Embarcadero Discussion Forums, Vedran Vuk posted some questions about object keyword.
His purpose was to use object instead of class to improve speed and memory consumption:

I do use classes. I just want to use objects on smaller classes that don't really need initialization or RTTI. Plus, I can directly operate on it like a record with no need for constructors and it can be sealed and has inheritance. Every byte matters in this case.

Rudy posted on the EMB forum that

The "object" type is deprecated. As was said, it mainly exists for compatibility with old Turbo Pascal. That is why it is not documented very well. It's use is not promoted.

I have the same requirement sometimes, for example for our framework or for low-level units.

I do like such plain-old object type, and don't want to see this object feature marked as deprecated in future EMB versions.

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2010, Tuesday July 27

Hyphenation in Delphi

By A.Bouchez on 2010, Tuesday July 27, 10:32 - Open Source libraries

We made some years ago a Delphi unit for hyphenation of text.

Such an unit, together with our SynPdf library for example, could be useful in your application. So we released the source!

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2010, Sunday March 28

Mac OS X Stack Alignment, asm and trolls

By A.Bouchez on 2010, Sunday March 28, 12:20 - Pascal Programing

In a very interesting comment, PhiS spoke about the Mac OS X Stack Alignment problem, and the way asm code should be written for the future Cross Platform Delphi compiler. Here are some (hope without any Troll hidden) reflections I went through.

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