Delphi Survey and the State of Delphi

CodeGear is doing their annual Delphi Product survey. If you haven't taken it yet, I would really encourage you to do it. I know Nick Hodges (Delphi product manager), and he reads all the comments and considers all the feedback very carefully when adding features to future versions of Delphi.

I found it took about 30 minutes to complete, but your mileage may vary. They won't share all the details of the survey, but they will share some of them.

Also, if you haven't seen it, I believe this is the latest Delphi Roadmap.

It still has D2007 as the to be released Highlander, but from everything I have heard, the 2008 Tiburón is still planned to have Generics (aka parameterized types) and Unicode in Win32 (Delphi 2007 delivered Generics for .NET). This is going to be a pretty big change for Delphi Win32. I know we have heard mention of Generics in Delphi for a long time now, but this looks highly likely with it on the official roadmap, and also with the fact it is in .NET and they like to maintain compatibility whenever possible.

While being really cool, the Unicode will also most likely require some code changes in existing applications to support it. Anywhere you assumed a Char to be a length of 1 will need to be updated. Also, storing non-text data in a string may not work right. There are a lot of people are cheering and a lot are grumbling. The survey actually touches on people's concerns with this.

Beyond Tiburón, in the 2009 time frame (code named Commodore) we will see native 64-Bit support, which is also a really big change.

There is also talk about a Delphi Parallel Library (which is actually on the RoadMap for beyond 2009). Allen Bauer has blogged about it quite a bit lately, so I am thinking / hoping it will be here sooner rather then later. The DPL is designed to take better advanced of all the multi-core/multi-processor systems out there. Beyond just thread pools and improvements on threading, I believe we will also see things like allowing a for loop to run each iteration on a different thread, and other language level awareness of multi-threading.

So some really big changes coming in the next couple years for Delphi! We are in exciting times to be working with in Delphi programming!

What to Expect in Delphi Unicode Support

Allen Bauer has a series of great blog posts (with more to come now doubt) outlining some of the technical details of what to expect with the new changes to support Unicode in the upcoming Tiburon version of Delphi.

• An intro to what to expect
• A great one on Unicode Character Categorization.
• Will there be a switch to turn String back to AnsiString? (Hint: No)
• More FAQ's about Unicode

So what is the reaction? Some people are grumpy that some of their code might break. Delphi has a long history of backwards compatibility. I am sure CodeGear will do what they can to make as much code as possible work, but this looks like it might cause some problems if you ever made assumptions about the size of a Char (which was generally discouraged) or used a string to store non-text (Which I am VERY guilty of. They are just so dang useful!) Personally I am really looking forward to Unicode in Delphi, even if there are a few growing pains.

Orcas is Part of the Delphi Family

So I wanted to look up something on Oracs, the as yet unreleased development tool from Microsoft for Vista. So I went to Firefox and typed Orcas into the Google search box. The first hit that came up was on Wikipedia and it turned out to be on Orca (the singular of Orcas). I actually learned a lot.

I knew Orca where killer whales, and I knew they were related to dolphins. What surprised me was that dolphins and killer whales are both in the Delphinidae family. I thought that was really revealing that Microsoft choose that as the code name for their product, especially now that they are playing catch up with Delphi again. In case you didn't know, CodeGear (FKA Borland) now has two IDE's (Delphi 2007 and C++ Builder 2007) released that support Microsoft's Windows Vista, while Microsoft doesn't have one released yet.

Now someone pointed out that you can use .NET 3.0 with Visual Studio 2005 to get some Vista support, but from my understanding you still don't get Sheet of Glass support on your forms, or some of the other neato Aero effects without writing extra code. And to be fair, CodeGear's 2007 releases don't support .NET 3.0 or much of the specific functionality only exposed through .NET 3.0 - then again, it is a native Win32 development tool, so of course it doesn't support .NET.

The significant fact is that CodeGear has two actual releases for Vista before Microsoft does. There are a number of great innovations in Delphi 2007 that Microsoft is yet to copy.

In related news, CodeGear released their Delphi Roadmap, which shows plans for Highlander to be released this year with support for .NET 2.0 and compatibility with .NET 3.0.

It is nice to see Delphi out in front again.

Score: Development tool releases for Vista

• CodeGear: 2
• Microsoft: 0

C++ Builder 2007 Announced

Just in case anyone missed the announcement. If this comes out before Orcas then CodeGear will have two IDE's released that specifically support developing for Vista and Microsoft will have 0. Looks like things are returning back to the way they were.

Key features and capabilities provided by C++Builder include:

• Seamless support for Microsoft Windows Vista Aero, Vista Desktop and Vista APIs
• Increased ANSI C++ conformance and compatibility including Boost and Dinkumware C++ library support
• New C++ build flexibility and custom configurations powered by the Microsoft MSBuild engine
• Up to 5 times in-IDE build performance improvements over prior versions
• UML C++ source code visualization
• Integrated C++ unit testing
• New DBX 4 RAD data access with support for the latest versions of popular RDBMs including CodeGear InterBase®, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL®, Oracle®, IBM® DB2, and Sybase®
• C++ IDE enhancements including virtual folders and enhanced C++ structure pane
• New INDY 10 Internet Protocol component suite

Read the press release

Free Turbo Delphi, C++ or C# External link: http://www.turboexplorer.com/

Just in case you some how missed it, you can get a free Turbo product from Borland / CodeGear. You your choice of Delphi for .NET, Delphi for Win32, C# Builder or C++ Builder, but you can only have one installed at a time. They are based on Delphi 2006. The catch for the free version (called Explorer) is you cannot install components, add-ins, etc. and can only have one version installed at a time. You can buy the Pro version for just a little bit more and lift those restrictions.

[TurboExplorer.com]

Future version will be based on the newer Delphi IDE's. I suspect that after they come out with Delphi Studio 2007 (guessing on the name) with support for .NET, Delphi, C# and C++ then they will have an updated Turbo release. They hinted they may change the restrictions some then too.

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Basics of Compiler Design External link: http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/torbenm/Basics/

Torben Mogensen from DIKU as the University of Copenhagen is offering the text book he has written on Basics of Compiler Design for free use.

I have taught an undergraduate compilers course for over a decade. In the last several years, I have used my own textbook "Basics of Compiler Design". I have now decided to make this available online.

Permission to copy and print for personal use is granted. If you, as a lecturer, want to print the book and sell it to your students, you can do so if you only charge the printing cost.

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