Synopse Open Source

Since there was recently some articles about performance comparison between several versions of the Delphi compiler, we had to react, and gives our personal point of view.

IMHO there won't be any definitive statement about this.
I'm always doubtful about any conclusion which may be achieved with such kind of benchmarks.
Asking "which compiler is better?" is IMHO a wrong question.
As if there was some "compiler magic": the new compiler will be just like a new laundry detergent - it will be cleaner and whiter...

Performance is not about marketing.
Performance is an iterative process, always a matter of circumstances, and implementation.

Circumstances of the benchmark itself.
Each benchmark will report only information about the process it measured.
What you compare is a limited set of features, running most of the time an idealized and simplified pattern, which shares nothing with real-world process.

Implementation is what gives performance.
Changing a compiler will only gives you some percents of time change.
Identifying the true bottlenecks of an application via a profiler, then changing the implementation of the identified bottlenecks may give order of magnitudes of speed improvement.
For instance, multi-threading abilities can be achieved by following some simple rules.

With our huge set of regression tests, we have at hand more than 16,500,000 individual checks, covering low-level features (like numerical and text marshaling), or high-level process (like concurrent client/server and database multi-threaded process).

You will find here some benchmarks run with Delphi 6, 7, 2007, XE4 and XE6 under Win32, and XE4 and XE6 under Win64.
In short, all compilers performs more or less at the same speed.
Win64 is a little slower than Win32, and the fastest appears to be Delphi 7, using our enhanced and optimized RTL.

Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) codes are widely used for integrity checking of data in fields such as storage and networking.
There is an ever-increasing need for very high-speed CRC computations on processors for end-to-end integrity checks.

We just introduced to mORMot's core unit (SynCommons.pas) a fast and efficient crc32c() function.

It will use either:

• Optimized x86 asm code, with unrolled loops;
• SSE 4.2 hardware crc32 instruction, if available.

Resulting speed is very good.
This is for sure the fastest CRC function available in Delphi.
Note that there is a version dedicated to each Win32 and Win64 platform - both performs at the same speed!

In fact, most popular file formats and protocols (Ethernet, MPEG-2, ZIP, RAR, 7-Zip, GZip, and PNG) use the polynomial $04C11DB7, while Intel's hardware implementation is based on another polynomial, $1EDC6F41 (used in iSCSI and Btrfs).
So you would not use this new crc32c() function to replace the zlib's crc32() function, but as a convenient very fast hashing function at application level.
For instance, our TDynArray wrapper will use it for fast items hashing.

We have just added a new "25 - JSON performance" sample to benchmark JSON process, using well most known Delphi libraries...

A new fight
featuring
mORMot vs SuperObject/XSuperObject/dwsJSON/DBXJSON

On mORMot side, it covers TDocVariant, late binding, TSQLTable, ORM, record access, BSON...

We tried to face several scenarios:

• parse/access/write iteration over a small JSON document,
• read of deeply nested 680 KB JSON (here mORMot is slower than SO/dwsJSON),
• read of one 180 MB JSON file (with on-the-fly adaptation to fit a record layout),
• named access to all rows and columns of a 1 MB JSON table, extracted from a SQL request (with comparison with our ORM performance).

On average and in details, mORMot is the fastest in almost all scenarios (with an amazing performance for table/ORM processing), dwsJSON performs very well (better than SuperObject), and DBXJSON is the slowest (by far, but XE6 version is faster than XE4).

From the beginning, server-side storage tables which were not store in a SQLite3 database were implemented via some classes inheriting from TSQLRestServerStatic.
This TSQLRestServerStatic was inheriting from TSQLRestServer, which did not make much sense (but was made for laziness years ago, if I remember well).

Now, a new TSQLRestStorage class, directly inheriting from TSQLRest, is used for per-table storage.
This huge code refactoring results in a much cleaner design, and will enhance code maintainability.
Documentation has been updated to reflect the changes.

Note that this won't change anything when using the framework (but the new class names): it is an implementation detail, which had to be fixed.