The Curiouser and Curiouser Case of Case-Insensitive Tweaks

Recent commits to the DWScript repository doubled the compiler performance when compiling many small scripts, like happens in the unit tests suites.

This started from a first profiling run where the memory allocations around the UnicodeLowerCase function came out as top bottlenecks.

Thing is, Pascal being a case-insensitive language, there are lots of case-insensitive comparisons, lookups, searches and hashes, and turns out a key hash code was computed with code like

(more…)

property reintroduce – when a method becomes a property

A tentative new language feature has been pushed to the DWScript repository: “property reintroduce”.

The aim is to allow a method to be reintroduced as a property, and do so in a non-fatal fashion so it can be pushed to production and existing code can be migrated iteratively. (more…)

DWScript issues tracker now on GitHub

For quite sometime the issue tracker at BitBucket has been barely usable, and Atlassian does not seem to have bothered fixing it… So if you have issues with DWScript, please now post them on the issues tracker of the GitHub DWScript mirror. (more…)

Triple apostrophe multi-line strings support in DWScript

In the wake of Delphi 12 support, DWScript just got support for the “triple apostrophe” multi-line string syntax introduced with Delphi 12. This syntax comes in addition to the previously supported multi-line syntaxes.

As there is some degree of ambiguity in the new syntax, the syntax in DWScript is based on my current understanding of what the Delphi 12 doc and parser do. (more…)

DWScript update for Delphi 12

DWScript has been updated for Delphi 12 support, there are only minor changes required and they are in the DWScript repository.

On a side note, the Delphi 12 IDE definitely feels more snappy when navigating code or invoking code insight (ctrl+space) on large projects (more than 2 MLOC), which is nice!

Added support for readonly fields in DWScript

Support for “readonly” class fields has been added to DWScript repository.
The syntax is similar to the one in Oxygene, with a qualifier following a field declaration: (more…)

SamplingProfiler 23.8.21

SamplingProfiler 23.8.21 is now available. This version is all about cosmetic fixes:

Display Delphi internal version number for unknown Delphi versions instead of defaulting to ‘XE2’
Replaced old directory browser in search paths dialog
Minor HDPI fixes

Also the zip only includes the 64bit version now (which should work with 32bit executables).

New SamplingProfiler with HDPI support

A new SamplingProfiler v23.4.25 version is now available.

The main highlight of this release is support for HDPI displays, no more blurry text on that 4k monitor!

This is also the first version compiled with Delphi 11.3, which fixed several HDPI issues in the VCL that were holding back HDPI support.

Optimization in the era of ChatGPT and Godbolt

Here I will share my current workflow for low-level optimization, which these days is basically a roundtrip between Delphi, SamplingProfiler, ChatGPT and Godbolt.

This can allow you to produce code that runs faster than any single C compiler, while staying with Delphi code. (more…)

FocusFusion 1.4.0 – fixes and speedups

FocusFusion 1.4.0 update is now available in the Windows Store. This version fixes two issues introduced with 1.3.7: the wavelet focus stacking being cropped too tight and small rendering artefacts.

There were also small performance improvements around memory management and caching for up to 10% faster fusion. This version also introduces the use of fused multiply-add CPU instructions (FMA) whenever available, but a the moment with zero improvements unless you have very, very fast main memory.

DelphiTools

DWS, Profiler and other Pascal tools

Author Archives: Eric Grange