Delphi 2005, 2 Weeks Later

From: Allen Drennan (adrennan_at_wiredred.com)
Date: 01/28/05 

Date: 27 Jan 2005 22:33:21 -0800

It's been 2 weeks since I upgraded from D7 to D2005 and been forcing
myself, despite any issues, to use D2005 for my day to day production
work. I spend about 8 hours a day in the IDE.

The BAD:

All three of the Flash movies I made demonstrating bugs in Delphi
turned out to be IDE or Compiler bugs that were eventually confirmed by
Borland. Thanks to them for responding so quickly.

1. The worst problem is that Delphi 2005 simply crashes and disappears
from the task list on random occassions. I now hit Ctrl-Shift-S (save
all) every few minutes and always before compiling.

2. The 2nd worst problem is that it is very slow, even on fast
machines like my 3+Ghz P4 with 1GB of RAM. I would definately not
recommend less than 1GB of RAM. To help with the speed, I removed
Together support which made a big difference and disabled all the
various "insights" like error and code insight. This helped, but large
projects are still fairly sluggish. I miss being able to compile code
as fast as D7.

3. When switching from code to form design it quite often throws
random AVs. This is no big deal, just slightly annoying.

4. Various reported QC issues that are already known like the Library
Path issues, icons disappearing, etc.

The GOOD:

Delphi 2005 is far from ideal, but its workable.

1. Virtually all my Win32 projects converted to Delphi 2005 without
any major code issues or lengthy test/debug cycles.

2. Most of the VCL Win32 component sources that I used converted
without changes.

3. Certain things seem faster in the compiled finished EXE.

Relevant Pages

  • Alternative Future of Delphi?
    ... relevant compiler or interpreter... ... No more intricate code generation required for a particular platform ... on the Delphi compiler side. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Which Delphi Version To Buy
    ... Given the fact that Delphi compiler is quick and small, do you see feasible having a runtime compiler/parser enabling what you describe above? ... For example the basic data types processing in Delphi is sensibly superior to .NET's one exactly because is closer to the iron. ... Well, for parallel programming I, for one, certainly feel the need of a VM simply because the actual CPU architecture is far from the way in which humans deal with the reality which is parallel. ... The vast majority of the games you have to deal with /different/ characters doing /different/ actions in parallel, responding each one to the stimuli which comes from the environment. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Version after Version
    ... merely because Delphi has no 64-bit compiler? ... >> targeted instructions and increasing the size of the cache to 32,000 ... >> That has nothing to do with the number of address lines on the CPU ...
    (alt.comp.lang.borland-delphi)
  • D7 revival? stirring the old pot + Delphi 64 suggestion
    ... The new compiler, but with the old IDE, the old help. ... You can check other areas of the site and poster stats, it's not that Delphi posters don't use .Net, it's just that they don't use Delphi for .Net work. ... As for the 64bit debugging, a CPU view debugger would be all that is really needed to get things started (this is for fastcode after all), no need for rich source-level debugging, inspectors, etc. early on. ... Validation could be two-ways: one in the fastcode challenge, another made via CodeGear private unit tests. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Compiler optimisation
    ... > Keep in mind that Delphi is one-pass compiler. ... > limits number of possible optimizations to ones that do not operate ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)