Synopse Open Source

Do you remember this former article about scalability of the Delphi memory manager, in multi-thread execution context?

Our SynScaleMM is still experimental.
But did pretty well, for an experiment!

At first, you can take a look at ScaleMM2, which is more stable, and based on the same ground.

But a new multi-thread friendly memory manager for Delphi just came out.
It is in fact the anonymous (and already famous) "NN memory manager" Primož talked about in his article about string building and memory managers.

(Note that in this article, our SynScaleMM was found to be scaling very well, but on the other hand, Primož did compile its benchmark program in Debug mode, so our TTextWriter was not in good shape: when you compile in Release mode, optimizations and inlining are ON, and our good TTextWriter just flies... See the note at the beginning of the article - this is why I never find those benchmarks very informative. I always prefer profiling from the real world with real useful process… and was never convinced by any such naive benchmark.)

OK, back to our business!

SapMM is an interesting beast.
https://code.google.com/p/sapmm

Sounds like if Alexei (the initial coder) has a C coding background. But that's fine when you have to deal with low-level structures and algorithms, as required by a memory manager. :)
It features everything we may ask for such a piece of code: clear design, optimized code (mostly by inlining process), memory leak reporting, some parameters for tuning.

It is only for Delphi XE (and up) under Win32 by now, but contributors are welcome!
It is used in production since more than half a year, and it passed all FastcodeMM benchmark tests.

If you want a direct link of the today's source code, without SVN, you may try this direct link from our site.
(but it probably will never be updated - you are warned)

Among all trolling subject in forums, you'll find out the great Garbage Collection theme.

Fashion languages rely on it. At the core of the .Net and Java framework, and all scripting languages (like JavaScript, Perl, Python or Ruby), you'll find a Garbage Collector. New developers, just released from schools, do learn about handling memory only in theory, and just can't understand how is memory allocated - we all have seen such rookies involved in Delphi code maintenance, leaking memory as much as they type. In fact, most of them did not understood how a computer works. I warned you this will be a trolling subject.

And, in Delphi, there is no such collector. We handle memory in several ways:

• Creating static variables - e.g. on the stack, inside a class or globally;
• Creating objects with class instances allocated on heap - in at least three ways: with a try..finally Free block, with a TComponent ownership model in the VCL, or by using an interface (which creates an hidden try..finally Free block);
• Creating reference-counted variables, i.e. string, array of, interface or variant kind of variables.

It is a bit complex, but it is also deadly powerful. You have several memory allocation models at hand, which can be very handy if you want to tune your performance and let program scale. Just like manual recycling at home will save the planet. Some programmers will tell you that it's a waste of cell brain, typing and time. Linux kernel gurus would not say so, I'm afraid.

Then came the big Apple company, which presented its new ARC model (introduced in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion) as a huge benefit for Objective-C in comparison with the Garbage Collection model. And let's face it: this ARC just sounds like the Delphi memory model.

We just released a new unit to the source code repository.

It's a simple, small and compact MM, built on top of the main Memory Manager(FastMM4 is a good candidate, standard since Delphi 2007), architectured in order to scale on multi core CPU's (which is what FastMM4 is lacking).

Original code is ScaleMM - Fast scaling memory manager for Delphi by André Mussche.