News from mORMot's Burrow

We are pleased to share that mORMot 2 now offers initial compatibility with Delphi's Linux and macOS x86_64 compilers for console/server applications.
This effort originated from GitHub issue #442.

Thanks to community testing and contributions, core units now compile and run on these platforms.

OpenAPI, which was formerly called Swagger, is a set of specifications to encode the server API endpoints definitions into text, mostly JSON.
From this reference text, you can generate client code to access the service, in a vast number of languages.

Delphi seems to be far behind other languages, in terms of this code generation. I found nothing even working for FPC.
Since we needed it for our internal tools at Tranquil IT, we just published the new mormot.net.openapi.pas Open Source unit, which is quite a game changer. Thanks Andreas for starting this project, and testing it in its early age!

Since its earliest days, our mORMot framework did offer extensive regression tests. In fact, it is fully test-driven, and almost 78 million individual tests are performed to cover all its abilities:

We just integrated those tests to the TranquilIT build farm, and its great LUTI tool. So we have now continuous integration tests over several versions of Windows, Linux, and even Mac!
LUTI is the best mORMot's friends these days.

For most projects, we want to be able to pass some custom values when starting it.
The command line is then used to add this additional information.

We have ParamStr and ParamCount global functions, enough to retrieve the information. You may also use FindCmdLineSwitch for something more easy to work with.
The Lazarus RTL offers some additional methods like hasOption or getOptionValue or checkOptions in its TCustomApplication class. Their are better, but not so easy to use, and not available on Delphi.

We just committed a new command line parser to our Open Source mORMot 2 framework, which works on both Delphi and FPC, follows both Windows and POSIX/Linux conventions, and has much more features (like automated generation of the help message), in an innovative and easy workflow.

Starting with its version 5.1, MongoDB disabled the legacy protocol used for communication since its beginning.
As a consequence, our mORMot client was not able to communicate any more with the latest versions of MongoDB instances.

Last week, we made a deep rewrite of mormot.db.nosql.mongodb.pas, which changed the default protocol to use the new layout on the wire. Now messages use regular MongoDB Database Commands, with automated compression if needed.

No change is needed in your end-user MongoDB or ORM/ODM code. The upgrade is as simple as update your mORMot 2 source, then recompile.

EKON 25 at Düsseldorf was a great conference (konference?).

At last, a physical gathering of Delphi developers, mostly from Germany, but also from Europe - and even some from USA! No more virtual meetings, which may trigger the well known 'Abstract Error' on modern pascal coders.
There were some happy FPC users too - as I am now.

I have published the slides of my conferences, mostly about mORMot 2.
By the way, I wish we would be able to release officially mORMot 2 in December, before Christmas. I think it starts to be stabilized and already known to be used on production. We expect no more breaking change in the next weeks.

The .zip format is from last century, back to the early DOS days, but can still be found everywhere. It is even hidden when you run a .docx document, a .jar application, or any Android app!
It is therefore (ab)used not only as archive format, but as application file format / container - even if in this respect using SQLite3 may have much more sense.

We recently enhanced our mormot.core.zip.pas unit:

• to support Zip64,
• with enhanced .zip read/write,
• to have a huge performance boost during its process,
• and to integrate better with signed executables.

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.

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  […]

Marco Cantu, product manager of Delphi/RAD Studio, did publish the official RAD Studio 2016 Product Approach and Roadmap.
The upcoming release has a codename known as "BigBen", and should be called Delphi 10.1 Berlin, as far as I understand.

After this summer, another release, which codename is "Godzilla", will support Linux as a compiler target, in its Delphi 10.2 Tokyo release.
This is a very good news, and some details are given.
I've included those official names to mORMot's internal compiler version detection.
Thanks Marco for the information, and pushing in this direction!

My only concern is that it would be "ARC-enabled"...