Tag - MetaData

Entries feed - Comments feed

2015-11-21

Try to avoid RTTI (ab)use

There is a very trendy move, since a few years, to value so called "meta-programming".
In short, it is about the ability to treat programs as their data.
It is a very powerful paradigm in functional languages, and it was also introduced to OOP languages, even in SmallTalk a long time before this concept was trendy in Ruby, C# or Java.

In OOP compiled languages, reflection is used to achieve a similar behavior at run-time, mainly via RTTI (Run-Time Type Information).
Delphi supports RTTI since its version 1, as it was heavily used e.g. for all UI streaming.
In our framework, we rely on RTTI for its main features: ORMSOA and MVC - and even in some other parts, like Desktop UI generation.

But RTTI could easily be abused.
Here are some thoughts, started as a comment in a good old Mason's blog article about how RTTI performance may be a bottleneck.
My comment was to get rid of RTTI, and follow a SOLID implementation with explicit OOP code, like use of interface.

Continue reading

2013-03-07

64 bit compatibility of mORMot units

I'm happy to announce that mORMot units are now compiling and working great in 64 bit mode, under Windows.
Need a Delphi XE2/XE3 compiler, of course!

ORM and services are now available in Win64, on both client and server sides.
Low-level x64 assembler stubs have been created, tested and optimized.
UI part is also available... that is grid display, reporting (with pdf export and display anti-aliasing), ribbon auto-generation, SynTaskDialog, i18n... the main SynFile demo just works great!

Overall impression is very positive, and speed is comparable to 32 bit version (only 10-15% slower).

Speed decrease seems to be mostly due to doubled pointer size, and some less optimized part of the official Delphi RTL.
But since mORMot core uses its own set of functions (e.g. for JSON serialization, RTTI support or interface calls or stubbing), we were able to release the whole 64 bit power of your hardware.

Delphi 64 bit compiler sounds stable and efficient. Even when working at low level, with assembler stubs.
Generated code sounds more optimized than the one emitted by FreePascalCompiler - and RTL is very close to 32 bit mode.
Overall, VCL conversion worked as easily than a simple re-build.
Embarcadero's people did a great job for VCL Win64 support, here!

Continue reading

2011-01-22

Synopse Big Table 1.12a

Synopse Big Table is an open source Delphi unit for very fast data storage and access, using key/values pairs, or records organized with fields.

With this 1.12a version, the unit has evolved into a true field-oriented database, with two new classes:
TSynBigTableRecord to store an unlimited number of records with fields;
TSynBigTableMetaData to store any data (pictures, HTML, text) associated with metadata fields.

Both classes handle variable-length storage of integers, floats, currency, text (Unicode or not) with a field name. On-the-fly field adding, integrated indexing and search capabilities.
Data access can be either fast direct access, or via late-binding (i.e. use Record.Field in your Delphi code).

Classic Key/Value storage is always possible via TSynBigTable or TSynBigTableString, but is now faster and safer. A few issues were corrected.

Update: version 1.12b has been published (same download link).
Some issues have been fixed about packing and the two new classes types.

Continue reading