Mason Wheeler's thoughts on Delphi programming in general, and particularly on the technical aspects of developing the TURBU engine and editor.
Posts tagged ‘Wish List’
I’ve been doing a lot of string processing work lately. Delphi has a lot of strengths, but unfortunately string manipulation really isn’t one of them. It gets really messy really quickly if you’re trying to do anything complicated. Extracting substrings out of strings quickly degenerates into a mess of difficult-to-read Copy calls. It would sure be nice if there was a better way. Continue reading ‘Wish list: Slicing syntax’ »
One annoying thing I’ve noticed in building my script compiler is the way the use of generic collections tends to bloat up the size of your EXE. I use generics for a lot of things; a compiler uses lists, stacks and lookup tables (dictionaries) all over the place. When I was building it with DeHL, the compiler plus a very simple test frontend compiled into a 36 MB behemoth of a binary, and a quick look at the mapfile shows that the vast majority of that was DeHL collections. Now that I’ve switched to the more simplified Collections library, it “only” takes 23 MB, a savings of about 33%. But that’s still huge. There has to be a better way.