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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.

Last weeks, we have enhanced mORMot support to one of the more powerful AARM64 CPU available: the Ampere Altra CPU, as made available on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Long story short, this is an amazing hardware to run on server side, with performance close to what Intel/AMD offers, but with almost linear multi-core scalability. The FPC compiler is able to run good code on it, and our mORMot 2 library is able to use the hardware accelerated opcodes for AES, SHA2, and crc32/crc32c.

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.

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.

EKON 24 just finished. "The conference for Delphi & more" was fully online this year, due to the viral context... But this was a great event, and I am very happy to have been part of it. Please find the slides on my two sessions: mORMot 2 Performance: from Delphi to AVX2 Of course,  […]

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  […]

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!

Sometimes, I am asked what could be done with mORMot. Well, we've been using the library at LiveMon to analyse logs for example. And we're able to get speed of a few TB/sec. Speed above is no typo: TB/s not GB/s. For a regex search, not a per-word dictionary based lookup. With a cross-platform  […]