I've moved this blog to a separate server and domain, mainly to ensure it's content is preserved and under my control. You should update your subscriptions to point to: therealoracleatdelphi.com. I'm certain that some links and images didn't quite survive the move, but most of the more recent posts seem OK. A lot of comments also moved, but not all were able to be imported due to some length restrictions. Delphi and product related content will remain here as well... for as long as whomeve...

No, not this Monitor, this Monitor. Ever since it’s introduction, it’s been the subject of both scorn and praise… ok, ok, scorn. Recently, during our current field test for the next version of RAD Studio*, one of our long-time field-testers posted a reference to this excellent blog post by Eric Grange relating to the performance of the TMonitor vs. the Windows Critical Section. In that post, Eric makes a strong case against TMonitor. Since I’m somewhat personally invested in the TMonitor...

I thought I’d take a few moments (or more) to answer some questions regarding the just introduced Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) mechanism to Delphi on mobile platforms (namely iOS in XE4, and Android in a future release). Among some sectors of our customer base there seems to be some long-running discussions and kvetching about this change. I will also say that among many other sectors of our customer base, it’s been greeted with marked enthusiasm. Let’s start with some history… Meet...

I recently did an email interview with Martin Strohal of the Delphi-Treff Team. I got permission to publish the original English version (Since my German is a little rusty...) Delphi XE2 will be published this year. What are the key features of this new release? (Is this the release named "Pulsar"?) Customers will now be able to target Windows 32bit, Windows 64bit, and Mac OSX 32bit. XE2 introduces a new cross-platform GUI-centric, GPU accelerated component framework called, FireMonkey. VCL also...

The Windows x64 ABI (Application Binary Interface) presents some new challenges for assembly programming that don’t exist for x86. A couple of the changes that must be taken into account can can be seen as very positive. First of all, there is now one and only one OS specified calling convention. We certainly could have devised our own calling convention like in x86 where it is a register-based convention, however since the system calling convention was already register based, that would have be...

While implementing the x64 built-in assembler for Delphi 64bit, I got to “know” the AMD64/EM64T architecture a lot more. The good thing about the x64 architecture is that it really builds on the existing instruction format and design. However, unlike the move from 16bit to 32bit where most existing instruction encodings were automatically promoted to using 32bit arguments, the x64 design takes a different approach. One myth about the x64 instructions is that “everything’s wider.” That’s not the...

So far we’ve had “Testing synchronization primitives” and “Writing a ‘self-monitoring’ thread-pool.” Let’s build on those topics, and discuss what to do with exceptions that occur within a scheduled work item within a thread pool. My view is that exceptions should be caught and held for later inspection, or re-raised at some synchronization point. What do you think should happen to the exceptions? Should they silently disappear, tear-down the entire application, or should some mechanism be in pl...

Let’s start thinking about thread pools. How do you manage a general purpose thread pool in the face of no-so-well-written-code? For instance, a task dispatched into the thread pool never returns, effectively locking that thread from ever being recycled. How do you monitor this? How long do you wait before spooling out a new thread? Do you keep a “monitor thread” that periodically checks if a thread has been running longer than some (tunable) value? What are the various techniques for addressing...

In this office. I’ve been in the same physical office for nearly 15 years. After years of accumulation, it now looks positively barren. Beginning next Monday, March 29th, 2010, I’ll be in a new building, new location, and new office. The good thing is that the new place is a mere stone’s throw from the current one. It will be great to leave all the Borland ghosts behind....

I’m going to try a completely different approach to this post. I’ll post a question and simply let the discussion ensue. I would even encourage the discussion to spill over to the public newsgroups/forums. Question for today is: How can you effectively unit-test synchronization primitives for correctness or more generally, how would you test a concurrency library? Let’s see how far we can get down this rabbit hole ;-)....