Mason Wheeler's thoughts on Delphi programming in general, and particularly on the technical aspects of developing the TURBU engine and editor.
Archive for May 2011
I got an email this morning from Embarcadero, a pretty straightforward marketing letter that probably everyone on SA for Delphi received. But one thing caught my eye:
64-bit is scheduled to be released this August.
That’s not particularly unexpected, since that’s when the new releases tend to come out. But it does confirm one thing I thought was kind of strange when I got the DelphiLive! 2011 Call For Papers email a few weeks ago. Continue reading ‘Odd timing’ »
One of the biggest challenges in working on the TURBU engine has been minimizing load times. Some large projects have a whole lot of data to work with, which could take the better part of a minute to load if I tried to load it all up front. No one wants to sit and wait for that, so I’ve pared down the loading so that only the stuff that’s needed right away gets loaded from the project database right at startup.
And yet, on one of my larger test projects, that wasn’t enough. One of the things that has to be loaded upfront was map tile data, so that the maps can draw. Unfortunately, this project has over 200 different tilesets, and it was taking quite a while to load that much data. I’ve got a RTTI-based deserializer that can turn dataset records into objects, but it was taking a completely unreasonable 3.3 seconds to read the tile data.
Continue reading ‘How default settings can slow down FastMM’ »
Last year when I was at Delphi Live, the event was a bit smaller than it had been the year before. Less attendees, less sessions, not as nice of a venue, etc. Kind of to be expected, with the economy in the toilet and all, but still it was sorta sad. I heard a few people mention that the way things had gone, they doubted there would be another one this year.
Just yesterday I was thinking back on that, and I figured it was probably right, or we would have heard an announcement about it by now. And that kinda sucked. I’d really enjoyed going there the last two years. Well, I’m glad to be able to say I was wrong about that.
I wrote my last post about enabling booleans in Firebird after several hours of poking around in database code trying to get my query to execute without errors. Once it worked, everything seemed great. But I missed an important step: I hadn’t tried to write anything back to the database yet.