Synopse Open Source

The official release of mORMot 2 is around the edge. It may be the occasion to show some data persistence performance numbers, in respect to mORMot 1.

For the version 2 of our framework, its ORM feature has been enhanced and tuned in several aspects: REST routing optimization, ORM/JSON serialization, and in-memory and SQL engines tuning. Numbers are talking. You could compare with any other solution, and compile and run the tests by yourself for both framework, and see how it goes on your own computer or server.
In a nutshell, we almost reach 1 million inserts per second on SQLite3, and are above the million inserts in our in-memory engine. Reading speed is 1.2 million and 1.7 million respectively. From the object to the storage, and back. And forcing AES-CTR encryption on disk almost don't change anything. Now we are talking.

Generics are a clever way of writing some code once, then reuse it for several types.
They are like templates, or compiler-time shortcuts for type definitions.

In the last weeks, we added a new mormot.core.collections.pas unit, which features:

• JSON-aware IList<> List Storage;
• JSON-aware IKeyValue<> Dictionary Storage.

In respect to Delphi or FPC RTL generics.collections, this unit uses interfaces as variable holders, and leverage them to reduce the generated code as much as possible, as the Spring4D 2.0 framework does, but for both Delphi and FPC. It publishes TDynArray and TSynDictionary high-level features like indexing, sorting, JSON/binary serialization or thread safety as Generics strong typing.

Resulting performance is great, especially for its enumerators, and your resulting executable size won't blow up as with the regular RTL unit.

The latest revision of Delphi, named Delphi 11 Alexandria, is out.
A lot of new features, some enhanced platforms. Nice!
But it is also for us the opportunity to come back to some breaking changes, which appeared in Delphi 10.4 earlier this year, and are now "officially" part of Delphi 11.

The main breaking change of Delphi 10.4 and later, as reported by mORMot users, is the new lifetime of local variables.
TL&LR: a local variable which is not explicitly declared, but returned by a function may be released as soon as it is not used any more, whereas in the original implementation, it was allocated as a regular local variable, and we could expect its lifetime to remain active up to the end of the function. With Delphi 10.4, it is not the case any more: the compiler could release/clear the local variable sooner, to reduce the allocation pressure.

Idea behind this change is that it may have better register allocation within the function, so it "may" theoretically result in faster code. Not convinced about it, anyway - we will discuss that.
The main thing is that it could break existing code, because it breaks the Delphi compiler expectation since decades.
Some perfectly fine working code would end to work as expected. We have identified several use cases with mORMot which are affected by this change. Since it seems there will be no coming back from Delphi point of view, it is worth a blog article.

Debug information can be generated by compilers, to contain symbols and source code lines. This is very handy to have a meaningful stack trace on any problems like exceptions, at runtime.

The problem is that debug information can be huge. New code style with generics tends to increase this size into a bloated way...
On Delphi, mormot2tests generates a 4MB .map file;
on FPC, mormot2tests outputs a 20MB .dbg file in DWARF.

For Delphi, we propose our own binary .mab format which reduces this 4MB .map file into a 290KB .mab file since mORMot 1.
Now mORMot 2 can reduce a FPC debug file of 20MB into a 322KB .mab file!
And this .mab information can just be appended to the executable for single-file distribution, if needed, during the build. No need to distribute two files, potentially with synchronization issues.

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  […]

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.

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.