Synopse Open Source

2014-05-25

New crc32c() function using optimized asm and SSE 4.2 instruction

By AB4327-GANDI, 2014-05-25. Open Source › mORMot Framework

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.

2014-05-18

Automatic JSON serialization of record or dynamic arrays via Enhanced RTTI

By AB4327-GANDI, 2014-05-18. Open Source › mORMot Framework

Since Delphi 2010, the compiler generates additional RTTI at compilation, so that all record fields are described, and available at runtime.
By the way, this enhanced RTTI is one of the reasons why executables did grow so much in newer versions of the compiler.

Our SynCommons.pas unit is now able to use this enhanced information, and let any record be serialized via RecordLoad() and RecordSave() functions, and all internal JSON marshalling process.

In short, you have nothing to do.
Just use your record as parameters, and, with Delphi 2010 and up, they will be serialized as valid JSON objects.

Of course, text-based definition or callback-based registration are still at hand, and will be used with older versions of Delphi.
But you could be used to by-pass or extend the enhanced-RTTI serialization, even on newer versions of the compiler.

New sample for JSON performance: mORMot vs SuperObject/XSuperObject/dwsJSON/DBXJSON

By AB4327-GANDI, 2014-05-18. Open Source › mORMot Framework

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).

"Native" means CPU-native... even Microsoft admits it!

By AB4327-GANDI, 2014-05-18. Pascal Programming

There were a lot of debate about what "native" was..

Especially for some great companies, you want to sell their compiler technologies...
For them, "native" is not CPU-native, but framework-native...

Even Microsoft claimed since the beginning of C# that the managed .Net model was faster, due to "optimized JIT or NGEN compilation"...

But even Microsoft is clearly changing its mind!

They switch to "Native" for their framework, especially when targeting mobile platforms!

2014-05-09

BREAKING CHANGE: TSQLRestServerStatic* classes are now renamed as TSQLRestStorage*

By AB4327-GANDI, 2014-05-09. Open Source › mORMot Framework

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.

2014-05-07

Benchmarking Mustache libraries: native SynMustache vs mustache.js/SpiderMonkey

By AB4327-GANDI, 2014-05-07. Open Source › mORMot Framework

I just wrote a small sample program, for benchmarking Mustache libraries: native SynMustache vs mustache.js running on SpiderMonkey 24...

And the winner is ...SynMustache, which is 10 times faster, uses almost no memory during process, and handles inlined {{>partials}} natively (whereas we have to handle them manually with mustache.js)!

Who says that Garbage Collection and immutable strings in modern JITted runtimes are faster than "native" Delphi applications?
Are you still preferring the "NextGen" roadmap?

MongoDB + mORMot benchmark

By AB4327-GANDI, 2014-05-07. Open Source › mORMot Framework

Here are some benchmark charts about MongoDB integration in mORMot's ORM.

MongoDB appears as a serious competitor to SQL databases, with the potential benefit of horizontal scaling and installation/administration ease - performance is very high, and its document-based storage fits perfectly with mORMot's advanced ORM features like Shared nothing architecture (or sharding).

MongoDB + mORMot ORM = ODM

By AB4327-GANDI, 2014-05-07. Open Source › mORMot Framework

MongoDB (from "humongous") is a cross-platform document-oriented database system, and certainly the best known NoSQL database.
According to http://db-engines.com in April 2014, MongoDB is in 5th place of the most popular types of database management systems, and first place for NoSQL database management systems.
Our mORMot gives premium access to this database, featuring full NoSQL and Object-Document Mapping (ODM) abilities to the framework.

Integration is made at two levels:

Direct low-level access to the MongoDB server, in the SynMongoDB.pas unit;
Close integration with our ORM (which becomes defacto an ODM), in the mORMotMongoDB.pas unit.

MongoDB eschews the traditional table-based relational database structure in favor of JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas (MongoDB calls the format BSON), which matches perfectly mORMot's RESTful approach.

This second article will focus on integration of MongoDB with our ORM.