Synopse Open Source

Thanks you all for have posted your feedback on our mORMot2 Survey!

Here are some insights.

First of all, if it was not clear enough: Delphi will continue to be supported in mORMot 2.0. Some people reported that our previous article may have been misleading. But perhaps not all versions. For sure, Delphi 5 and Kylix will not be supported in mORMot 2. It is also possible that it would not  […]

Our Open Source framework includes some optimized asm alternatives to RTL's move() and fillchar(), named MoveFast() and FillCharFast().

We just rewrote from scratch the x86_64 version of those, which was previously taken from third-party snippets.
The brand new code is meant to be more efficient and maintainable. In particular, we switched to SIMD 128-bit SSE2 or 256bit AVX memory access (if available), whereas current version was using 64-bit regular registers. The small blocks (i.e. < 32 bytes) process occurs very often, e.g. when processing strings, so has been tuned a lot. Non temporal instructions (i.e. bypassing the CPU cache) are used for biggest chunks of data. We tested ERMS support, but it was found of no benefit in respect to our optimized SIMD, and was actually slower than our non-temporal variants. So ERMS code is currently disabled in the source, and may be enabled on demand by a conditional.

FPC move() was not bad. Delphi's Win64 was far from optimized - even ERMS was poorly introduced in latest RTL, since it should be triggered only for blocks > 2KB. Sadly, Delphi doesn't support AVX assembly yet, so those opcodes would be available only on FPC.

Resulting numbers are talking by themselves. Working on Win64 and Linux, of course.

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  […]

You like working with mORMot ? We're hiring new developers at LiveMon.  We're a full-remote team (with a monthly gather-up in Paris), working on a real-time AI-powered monitoring tool. I joined LiveMon this week, and we will work together on this exciting project, using mORMot and FPC! Contact us at  […]

Almost every time I'm debugging some core part of our framework, I like to see the generated asm, and trying to optimize the pascal code for better speed - when it is worth it, of course! I just made a nice observation, when comparing the assembler generated by Delphi to FPC's output. Imagine you  […]

I just received a mail from Alfred (aka Alf in the source code), which did a lot of work to let our little mORMot compiles and run with FPC, especially under Linux, and also with an ARM processor. Hello Arnaud, A nice surprise ... Sample 2 native on Android !!!! See picture.  Works 100% !!!    […]

Current version of the main framework units target only Win32 and Win64 systems.

It allows to make easy self-hosting of mORMot servers for local business applications in any corporation, or pay cheap hosting in the Cloud, since mORMot CPU and RAM expectations are much lower than a regular IIS-WCF-MSSQL-.Net stack.
But in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), you would probably need to create clients for platforms outside the Windows world, especially mobile devices.

A set of cross-platform client units is therefore available in the CrossPlatform sub-folder of the source code repository. It allows writing any client in modern object pascal language, for:

• Any version of Delphi, on any platform (Mac OSX, or any mobile supported devices);
• FreePascal Compiler 2.7.1;
• Smart Mobile Studio 2.1, to create AJAX or mobile applications (via PhoneGap, if needed).

This series of articles will introduce you to mORMot's Cross-Platform abilities:

• Units and platforms;
• Generating the client code wrappers;
• Delphi / FreePascal clients;
• Smart Mobile Studio clients.

Any feedback is welcome in our forum, as usual!

Current version of the main framework units target only Win32 and Win64 systems.

It allows to make easy self-hosting of mORMot servers for local business applications in any corporation, or pay cheap hosting in the Cloud, since mORMot CPU and RAM expectations are much lower than a regular IIS-WCF-MSSQL-.Net stack.
But in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), you would probably need to create clients for platforms outside the Windows world, especially mobile devices.

A set of cross-platform client units is therefore available in the CrossPlatform sub-folder of the source code repository. It allows writing any client in modern object pascal language, for:

• Any version of Delphi, on any platform (Mac OSX, or any mobile supported devices);
• FreePascal Compiler 2.7.1;
• Smart Mobile Studio 2.1, to create AJAX or mobile applications (via PhoneGap, if needed).

This series of articles will introduce you to mORMot's Cross-Platform abilities:

• Units and platforms;
• Generating the client code wrappers;
• Delphi / FreePascal clients;
• Smart Mobile Studio clients.

Any feedback is welcome in our forum, as usual!

As we already stated here, the Delphi compiler for the Win64 target performs well, as soon as you by-pass the RTL and its sub-optimized implementation - as we do for mORMot.
In fact, our huge set of regression tests perform only 10% slower on Win64, when compared to Win32.
But we got access to much more memory - which is not a huge gain for a mORMot server, which uses very little of RAM - so may be useful in some cases, when you need a lot of structures to be loaded in your RAM.

Slowdown on Win64 is mostly due to biggest pointer size, which will use twice the memory, hence may generate a larger number of cache misses (failed attempts to read or write a piece of data in the cache, which results in a main memory access with much longer latency).
But in Delphi, apart from the RTL which may need more tuning about performance (but seems not to be a priority on Embarcadero side), is also sometimes less efficient when generating the code.
For instance, sounds like if case ... of ... end statements do not generated branch table instructions on Win64, whereas it does for Win32 - and FPC does for any x64 platform it supports.