Synopse Open Source

Last weeks, we have enhanced mORMot support to one of the more powerful AARM64 CPU available: the Ampere Altra CPU, as made available on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Long story short, this is an amazing hardware to run on server side, with performance close to what Intel/AMD offers, but with almost linear multi-core scalability. The FPC compiler is able to run good code on it, and our mORMot 2 library is able to use the hardware accelerated opcodes for AES, SHA2, and crc32/crc32c.

HTTP(S) is the main protocol of the Internet.
We enhanced the mORMot 2 socket client to push its implementation into more use cases. The main new feature is perhaps WGET-like processing, with hashing, resuming, console feedback, and direct file download.

Why OpenSSL? OpenSSL is the reference library for cryptography and secure TLS/HTTPS communication. It is part of most Linux/BSD systems, and covers a lot of use cases and algorithms. Even if it had some vulnerabilities in the past, it has been audited and validated for business use. Some algorithms  […]

I have just committed some new AesNiHash32 AesNiHash64 AesNiHash128 Hashers for mORMot 2. They are using AES-NI and SSE4.1 opcodes on x86_64 and i386. This implementation is faster than the fastest SSE4.1 crc32c and with a much higher usability (less collisions). Logic was extracted from the Go  […]

After a lot of work, our mORMot 2 fork is entering its testing phase.

The main /src/core /src/lib /src/net /src/db /src/orm /src/soa /src/app folders of our Source Code repository have been implemented.

Please check https://github.com/synopse/mORMot2 for the latest version of the source code. The README.md files on each folder would help you discover the new framework design, and the content of each unit.

Last weeks, we introduced REST, ORM and SOA process in the mORMot2 repository.

During this phase, we split the huge mORMot.pas unit into several mormot.rest.*.pas, mormot.orm.*.pas and mormot.soa.*.pas units, to follow SOLID principles.

But we also renamed the base types into something more consistent and easier to work with. Forget about TSQLRecord or TSQLRest, discover TORM and TRest!

A regression in the Delphi 10.4 compiler was identified. Its optimizer wrongly deletes some code, in one very specific part of the framework.

As a result a GPF (Access violation) may be triggered with Delphi 10.4 in release mode - the debug mode (when optimization is disabled) has no problem. Thanks to great user feedback, we were able to circumvent it. But we should better stay in alert, like any mORMot, until Delphi 10.4 officially release a patch.

As a gift to the FPC community, I just committed a new Memory Manager for FPC.
Check mormot.core.fpcx64mm.pas in our mORMot2 repository.
This is a stand-alone unit for FPC only.

It targets Windows and Linux multi-threaded Service applications - typically mORMot daemons.
It is written in almost pure x86_64 assembly, and some unique tricks in the Delphi/FPC Memory Manager world.

It is based on FastMM4 (not FastMM5), and we didn't follow the path of the FastMM4-AVX version - instead of AVX, we use plain good (non-temporal) SSE2 opcode, and we rely on the mremap API on Linux for very efficient reallocation. Using mremap is perhaps the biggest  benefit of this memory manager - it leverages a killer feature of the Linux kernel for sure. By the way, we directly call the Kernel without the need of the libc.

We tuned our x86_64 assembly a lot, and made it cross-platform (Windows and POSIX). We profiled the multi-threading, especially by adding some additional small blocks for GetMem (which is a less expensive notion of "arenas" as used in FastMM5 and most C allocators), introducing an innovatice and very efficient round-robin of tiny blocks (<128 bytes), and proper spinning for FreeMem and medium blocks.

It runs all our regression tests with huge performance and stability - including multi-threaded tests with almost no slow down: sleep is reported as less than 1 ms during a 1 minute test. It has also been validated on some demanding multi-threaded tasks.

On server side, a lot of CPU is done processing conversions to or from text. Mainly JSON these days.

In mORMot, we take care a lot about performance, so we have rewritten most conversion functions to have something faster than the Delphi or FPC RTL can offer.
Only float to text conversion was not available. And RTL str/floattexttext performance, at least under Delphi, is not consistent among platforms.
So we just added a new Double-To-Text set of functions.

The more I think of it, the more I am convinced it is time to change how the framework is versioned.
We have version 1.18 since years... difficult to follow... time to upgrade!

I would like to upgrade mORMot to version 2 - with a major refactoring.