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October 2011
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Delphi-Treff interview–In English
The Oracle at Delphi
– 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 ...
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More x64 assembler fun-facts–new assembler directives
The Oracle at Delphi
– 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 ...
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x64 assembler fun-facts
The Oracle at Delphi
– 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 ...
April 2010
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“Talk Amongst Yourselves” #3
The Oracle at Delphi
– 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 ...
March 2010
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Another installment of “Talk Amongst Yourselves”
The Oracle at Delphi
– 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 ...
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This is the last day…
The Oracle at Delphi
– 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 ...
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Simple question… very hard answer… Talk amongst yourselves…
The Oracle at Delphi
– 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 ...
February 2010
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A Happy Accident and a Silly Accident
The Oracle at Delphi
– By now you’re all aware that we’re getting ready to move to a new building here in Scotts Valley. This process is giving us a chance to clean out our offices and during all these archeological expeditions, some lost artifacts are being (re)discovered. Note the following: ...
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What. The. Heck.
The Oracle at Delphi
– Is. This? I simply cannot explain this. At. All. This was on a bulletin/white-board in the break area. I’d never noticed it because it was covered with photos from various sign-off (final authorization to release the product) celebrations. Lots of photos of both past and present co-workers, many ...
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A case when FreeAndNil is your enemy
The Oracle at Delphi
– It seems that my previous post about FreeAndNil sparked a little controversy. Some of you jumped right on board and flat agreed with my assertion. Others took a very defensive approach. Still others, kept an “arms-length” view. Actually, the whole discussion in the comments was very ...
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Oh, the things you find…
The Oracle at Delphi
– When you’re cleaning out your office. Share This | Email this page to a friend
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A case against FreeAndNil
The Oracle at Delphi
– I really like the whole idea behind Stackoverflow. I regularly read and contribute where I can. However, I’ve seen a somewhat disturbing trend among a lot of the answers for Delphi related questions. Many questions ask (to the effect) “why does this destructor crash when I call it?” Invariably, ...
January 2010
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There may be a silver lining after all
The Oracle at Delphi
– After having to deal with all the stack alignment issues surrounding our move to target the Mac OS, I’d started to fear that I would get more and more jaded cynical about the idiosyncrasies of this new (to many of us) OS. I was pleased to hear from Eli that ...
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Requiem for the {$STRINGCHECKS xx} directive…
The Oracle at Delphi
– It’s time. It’s time to say goodbye to the extra behind-the-scenes codegen and overhead that was brought to us during the Ansi->Unicode transition. We’ve shipped two versions with this directive on by default. The Ansi world is now behind us. It’s only real purpose in life was to assist C++Builder ...
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Divided and Confused
The Oracle at Delphi
– Odd discovery of the day. Execute the following on a system running a 32-bit version of Windows (NOT a Win64 system!): program Project1; {$APPTYPE CONSOLE} uses SysUtils; begin try MSecsToTimeStamp(-1); except on E: Exception do Writeln(E.ClassName, ': ', E.Message); ...
