The DWScript JavaScript code generator is now transitioning to ECMA6, as the the LTS versions of browsers are now completing the transition. So you will now see the code generator using “let” and other ECMA6 constructs where they make sense, in terms of performance or compacity.
Just downloaded and installed Delphi 11.1, and all the unit tests passed without a glitch. So I can announce that DWScript is compatible with Delphi 11.1 for Win32 and Win64! You can find links to all the Delphi 11.1 release details on Marco’s blog.
In other news, the tip of the DWScript repository is considered stable, but a round of core changes were made a few days ago. The last stable state just before the round of changes can be found in the DWScript Releases on the GitHub mirror. The next round of changes likely be able to will rip out the stack from the engine, and transition to closures.
Just pushed a few changes to the DWScript repository for compatibility with the just released Delphi 11 Alexandria.
The only change required was related to a fix of the Delphi compiler, which now properly has integer overflow checks controlled by $OVERFLOWCHECKS while they were previously controlled by $RANGECHECKS.
I also added support for the Delphi 11 dialect for binary literals (starting with %). DWScript already supported binary literals with the “0b” prefix since 2012 (as in C), I had been hoping the % symbol would not be sacrificed for this purpose, but oh well. (more…)
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.
SQLite offers through its JSON1 extension a lot of capability. Generating JSON outputs from SQL, even complex structured, multi-level JSON is very straightforward.
But what about the opposite use case ? When you have store data as JSON in an SQLite database, and you want to search or filter it ? This is a short exploration of what to expect.
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.
The current state has been frozen in Release snapshot DWScript v21.3.11 on the GitHub mirror.
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.
With the new year, work finally started on getting a Windows 64bit Just-In-Time compiler up and running for DWScript.
The repository on Bitbucket and the mirror on GitHub both already hold first working elements. At the moment unit tests are passing, though with effective JIT for only a smaller subset of features than for the 32 bit JIT.
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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.
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 😉