Re: FastCoder may solve mystery of Disappearing IDE. Or not.

It is not so obvious that it would solve as many problems as you seem
to think. It would be nice if it could fix the disappearing IDE
problem that some people have experienced, but your subject line in
this thread is the first claim I've seen that it might solve *that*
problem.

I agree. And it's really more than just the disappearing IDE problem, it's overall stability and AV's that it /might/ fix.

I haven't seen a single FastCoder make the specific
speculation that you make in this subject line. I wouldn't be terribly
surprised if that problem still occurs for some users even after the
memory allocation thing is fixed.

Given the track record of the first 3 updates, I wouldn't be surprised that after the 4th it still had problems. ;)

I know that I've experienced the
suddenly-disappearing app in many non-Delphi applications, many of
which I very very seriously doubt are even written in a Borland tool.
For example, I've lately had SimCity 4 suddenly disappear after
roughly an hour or two of play every time that I play it. I have music
notation software that I bought a few years back that is obviously
written in Visual C++ judging from the error messages, that also would
suddenly disappear without warning during use.

I presume you receive the error messages some other time? That is, you don't receive them just before the app "disappears", as that is not really disappearing, but more like "crashing".

There are a few other
examples of this happening in non-Borland software as well. In
addition, I have had D7 do the sudden disappearing act as well. This
all leads me to suspect that it is wildly premature to expect that
fixing the memory management bug is likely going to fix the
disappearing IDE problem in D2005.

We don't know yet. This may not be the silver bullet, but certainly we can be hopeful that if this problem is fixed, it will improve stability.

Furthermore, it is entirely possible that the only real effect of
fixing the reported bug is to enable people to use the FastMM memory
manager in D2005. 

Yes, that could be the case.

There very well could be a "happy coincidence"
between the memory sizes of blocks allocated by the borlndmm.dll and
the internal memory manager used by the RTL free routines, that
renders this offset irrelevant for users that do not switch memory
managers. In that case, fixing it will solve little for such users.

Based on what I've read here, that may be simplifying the situation a bit, but I am certainly no expert in these matters. I do agree that it is possible that it may not help at all so it is wise to wait for the results of Borland's investigation.

Only the users that know about the FastCode project and/or replacement
memory managers would benefit from such a fix. That sets this fix
rather far from the "mind-numbingly obvious" category of fixes at this
time. The fact is that we really do not know what QC items it will fix
in the end, and I suspect that this is a big part of the calculation
as to whether or not it warrants a patch #4.


I agree.

The more interesting aspect of this is just how universally supportive everyone is to see what's going on with this behavior in Delphi 2005. This is a good thing, it's nice to see TeamB and Dev Relations and NG users working together. But it also indicates to me that Delphi 2005's instability is a universal concern; i.e. most are aware that instability is a *real* problem in Delphi 2005. If Delphi 2005 was really stable for most people, I doubt that this bug would be as high profile as it is. 

--
Brian Moelk
bmoelk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.brainendeavor.com


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