Nested types in DWScript

Just a word of warning about a recent commit that added support for nested types in DWScript.

This support is at the moment only enabled in class declarations, and very minimally tested, a lot more testing is required – and welcome 🙂 – before it can be considered safe to use, and extended to other type declarations.

The related code should only kickoff if a “type” keyword is encountered in a class declaration (which would previously be reported as an error), so the change should be innocuous to existing code.

First phase of dynamic arrays refactoring completed

The first phase of dynamic arrays refactoring mentioned previously is now complete, with dedicated implementations in place for all the base types. A single interface (IScriptDynArray) is now the only common ground.

  • Memory usage is reduced to 1/3 on average, performance is improved up to 2x (without JIT)
  • Array indexes have thus been bumped from Integer to NativeInt, as arrays of more than 2 billions elements have become more practical

The current state has been frozen in Release snapshot DWScript v21.3.11 on the GitHub mirror.

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Refactoring DWScript dynamic arrays

After reaching initial stages of the x86-64 JIT, work on a long overdue enhancement of the DWScript engine has started: refactoring how dynamic arrays are implemented.

One of the goals when the 32bit JIT was introduced was to edge out the Delphi 32bits compiler, which was not too complicated as Delphi was using the FPU, so merely using SSE2 at the time was enough. But the Delphi 64bits compiler makes good use of SSE2, so the only way to edge it out would be to leverage AVX2 and vectorisation.

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TurboJPEG library rocks !

Units to support the TurboJPEG library is now available in the DWScript repository, you can find the relevant files in the Libraries\GraphicsLib folder, they have been tested with Delphi 10.3 in both Win32 and Win64. The DLLs are those of the latest 2.05 version.

The TurboJPEG library (aka “libjpeg-turbo”) provides a fast implementation of the libjpeg API, but the files here target the TurboJPEG core, rather than the libjpeg compatibility layer (see its documention).
The TurboJPEG API is less rich, but quite simple to use and very convenient.

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Dabbling in Neural Nets (again)

I recently dusted off an artificial neural network project, now published at https://bitbucket.org/egrange/daneuralnet/. This is a subject I’ve been dabbling on and off since the days of 8 bit CPUs.

The goals of the project are twofold: first experiment with neural networks that would be practical to run and train on current CPUs, and second experiment with JIT compilation of neural networks maths with Delphi.

TensorFlow and Python are cool, but they feel a bit too much like Minecraft, another sandbox of ready-made blocks 😉

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