TURBU Tech

I’ve been playing around with Delphi ever since high school.  I took a Pascal programming class and thought it was a really cool language.  Shame you couldn’t do visual programming with it, though.  (I was really into VB at the time.)  Then a buddy of mine introduced me to version 1 of “this new Visual Pascal program” and it was love at first byte.  But I didn’t get real serious about Delphi until about three years ago, when I decided to dust off an old pet project of mine from the D7 days, a tool I created for the purpose of making team collaboration easier for RPG Maker 2000 projects.

Continue reading ‘The joys of old code’ »

Most of my posts on here have been about technical subjects, geared towards moderate-to-advanced Delphi coders.  This one’s to help out the beginners who are still learning the ropes.  I’d like it to be something that people can send new users to from StackOverflow or other sites if they’re having trouble figuring out how to clean up their memory properly.

I’ve never really understood why people find memory management difficult.  Maybe I just “get it” for some reason, but it’s never seemed all that arcane or complex to me.  In all my time working with Delphi, I’ve only run into one truly difficult memory management scenario, and it’s something that most people won’t ever have to deal with: sharing global interface references across package boundaries.  If you do that wrong, you’re likely to run into some very strange errors at program shutdown that are hard to debug.

But people keep asking questions about the basics of what to free and how to free it on StackOverflow, and from answering them and analyzing the questions and the answers, it seems to me that the entirety of memory management can be boiled down to one single principle.

Continue reading ‘Delphi memory management made simple’ »

This morning on StackOverflow, someone asked a question about invoking constructors through extended RTTI. It happened that I’d had to work out a way to do that a couple weeks ago, and it took me about 5 minutes to find the code, strip out a few specific details and type up a solution.  I got an accepted response, a few upvotes, and a very interesting comment from the author:

Continue reading ‘Closing the documentation gap’ »

Delphi 2010’s help describes TValue, used by the RTTI unit to store values of arbitrary types, as “a lightweight version of the Variant type.” I saw that and it made me wonder, how lightweight is it? How fast is using TValue?

Thankfully, among D2010’s lesser-known new features is the Diagnostics unit, which gives us TStopwatch, a simple record for timing operations. That makes it very easy to write a simple speed test.
Continue reading ‘TValue is very slow!’ »

Sorry if this is a bit long and off-topic, but it’s incredibly important to anyone who makes computer use a significant part of their lifestyle. Please, read this and pass it on. Link people to this post, or copy it and repost it yourself.^*  Translate it into other languages if you have to. Everyone on the Internet needs to read and understand this.
Continue reading ‘The Tragedy of Steel’ »

I really loved when Delphi 2009 came out, how it fixed so many ugly problems in the Delphi IDE.  The stability issues and memory leaks that plagued D2006 and D2007 were greatly reduced.  And it just got better in D2010.

The tradeoff, though, seems to have been compiler stability.  Trying to do anything with Generics in D2009 before Update 3 came out was a nightmare, and even after, (and even in D2010,) there were still plenty of dark corners where you can end up with an Internal Compiler Error or linker error on something that, syntactically speaking at least, is perfectly cromulent Object Pascal.

Continue reading ‘How to break the D2010 compiler’ »