While refactoring a bit the way some “special” functions were handled in DWScript, I came about a case where the compiler started accepting strings as Math functions parameters.
While this comes naturally as an “interesting” side-effects of automatic typecasts, it left a feeling of “wrongness”, accepting literal code like Abs(“foo”) and then failing at run-time is asking for trouble.
In a Google+ comment to my recent article about inlining in XE6, Leif Uneus posted results from Scimark.
It appears that XE6 is about 30% slower than previous versions at least from XE5 to XE for 32bits floating point.
Note that Scimark does not make use of inlining, but does make heavy use of floating-point computations, loops and arrays.
Edit: issue discussed here was reported in QC 124652 (now marked as resolved)
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First noticed by dewresearch, Delphi XE6 introduced a new optimization for inlined functions that return a floating-point value.
Here is an exploration of what was improved… and what was not improved.
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Or in other words, before getting to the gory details, DWScript now works when compiled with {$HIGHCHARUNICODE ON} on a machine with Cyrillic code-page 1251.
DWScript was converted years ago to Unicode, and been working just fine.
But there was a leftover bug from that crossing of the Styx.
In Delphi you can initialize a dynamic array in two ways, either manually or via the Create magic constructor
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DWScript now has a new “unit namespace” feature, which aims at killing several birds with one stone:
Allen Bauer spilled the beans in reply to a question by Brandon Staggs, and speaks about “Window’s 8 dirty little secret”.
I’ve quoted his reply in full below (highlights are mine):
When “record with methods” were introduced, an important feature was overlooked: mutability.
This article discusses the problem, and introduces a possible syntax extension to solve it. Ideas & comments welcome!
On this StackOverflow question David Heffernan asked about a hack I’m using in DWScript’s UnifyAssignString.
The 64bit introduced SSE2 maths, replacing the silicon-based implementations of the FPU by software.
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