Mason Wheeler's thoughts on Delphi programming in general, and particularly on the technical aspects of developing the TURBU engine and editor.
Archive for the ‘Scripting’ Category.
I wrote a compiler at work today. It took about 5 hours.
Granted, its input is very simple and nowhere near Turing-complete, and its output is in Delphi, not any type of machine language or bytecode. But it definitely fits Joel Spolsky’s definition of a compiler. Continue reading ‘I built a compiler today’ »
A few years back, I ran across this post by Hallvard Vassbotn. (It’s a shame he stopped blogging, because he always had some very interesting stuff about the technical details of how stuff in Delphi works.) At the bottom was a paragraph that really fascinated me:
On a more technical level it suffices to say that they use custom and extremely compact and fast data structures, tricks and hacks to be able to represent millions and millions of objects within the constraints of a 32-bit Windows system. Throw in the use of Physical Address Extensions, storing per-class information in “virtual” class vars to reduce object instance size, creation of classes and their VMTs dynamically at runtime (!!), pointer packing, multithreading, the list just goes on and on.
Continue reading ‘Dynamic class creation: moving beyond the theoretical’ »