Synopse Open Source

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.

I just finished my workshop at EKON 23.
Like every year, it was a great event to attempt to, and I enjoyed presenting 2 sessions and 1 workshop.

Sessions were about "Kingdom Driven Design" (KDD), which is the name I used to define a cut-down version of "Domain Driven Design" (DDD).
Less paranoid, a bit less isolation, but perhaps more common sense for the less sensitive projects.
Some presentations and code are now available!

A long-awaited feature was the ability to create stand-alone mORMot Win64 applications via Delphi, with no external sqlite3-64.dll required.

It is now available, with proper integration, and encryption is working!

Now that Delphi 10.3 Rio is out, we had to ensure that our little mORMot would run with this revision. Since we don't make any commercial software with Delphi any more (we switched to FPC), I downloaded the Community Edition. We disabled the Error Insight feature, which seems not very stable  […]

We just committed a deep refactoring of the SynSQlite3Static.pas unit - and all units using static linking for FPC. It also includes a new encryption format for SQlite3, using AES, so much more secure than the previous one. This is a breaking change, so worth a blog article! Now all static .o .a  […]