DelphiTools, SamplingProfiler and General Delphi News
Time for a summer facelift!
This website is getting new responsive theme which is more mobile-device friendly and will hopefully load slightly faster. Truth be told, I was also getting tired of seeing the old look here and in 618965 other blogs and websites.
As a followup to the TIOBE & Pascal micro saga, thanks to David Champion, DWScript programming is now a (very) small part of the TIOBE TPCI stats, and Oxygene became its own language at position #163.
Here is an excerpt from the TIOBE update for July 2013
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Here is a summary of DWScript changes since the last update.
Language enhancement are centered around several additions for enumeration elements and sets, as well as a standard Map() method for arrays. The JIT compiler also got more capable, and there were various improvements to the support libraries and compatibility with older (D2009) and newer (DXE3) Delphi versions.
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A couple days ago, a Pascal game compiled with SmartMobileStudio was accepted on the FireFox MarketPlace as a packaged app.
It had only been tested on the FireFox OS desktop simulator, how would it hold its own on a real device?
We’re not talking of flagship phones with quad-cores like a Galaxy, a Nexus 4 or an iPhone, but mainstream, single-core, sub-$100 hardware…
For a couple months now, a JIT compiler has been available in the DWScript SVN for 32bits code. The JIT is meant to be transparent, that is, execution, debugging facilities and memory layouts are similar under JIT and interpretation, the only difference is the performance.
The JIT also uses a hybrid architecture, which was designed to allow developing the JIT incrementally, which directly derives from my only working on it a few hours at a time, every once in a while.
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Worst thing in popularity is not being considered, or found.
Looks like TIOBE is not alone in differentiating Delphi and Pascal, other popularity indexes share the same issue:
More indexes I looked at didn’t show the “runners up”, only the top 5 or top 10, but they may as well have differentiated.
For lang-index, merging Pascal (rank 11) and Delphi (24), would be enough to reach rank 10, ahead of Ruby, just shy of Perl.
For some unfathomable reason, the TIOBE index distinguishes between “Pascal” and “Object Pascal”, and the “Pascal” category is seeing growth:
So it can’t be the old classic procedural Pascal, can it? That leaves only Object Pascal dialects (FreePascal the largest, but also Oxygene and SmartPascal/DWScript). Pascal programming isn’t dead or dying.
Here is a summary of recent changes, language highlights are initial support for sets and a new Sort() method for dynamic arrays.
Apart form Linq & LLVM libraries which were previously mentioned, Brian Frost made multiple updates to the IDE Dialog. There were numerous other minor fixes and improvements, related to stability, performance and compatibility with Delphi code.
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Graphics32 is a rich, high-performance 32bits graphics library for Delphi, with extensive capability. This showcase was submitted by Christian-W Budde, who is an active contributor to the Graphics32 project.
Very experimental support for LLVM in DWScript is now in the googlecode repository, thanks to the efforts of Christian-W Budde.
This is the beginning of the opening of new realms of possibilities for DWS!
LLVM support is currently centered around jit compilation, and at the moment doesn’t extend much beyond the needs of the Mandelbrot demo (see below for what is supported right now).