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by rbranson 5387 days ago
Actually, I have used Delphi, wrote tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of lines of it early on in my programming days, many years ago.

Yes, Delphi, the language, which uses a static, strongly typed language, reference counting for memory management, and native ahead-of-time compilation can achieve good performance. That's a shocker. The problem is this isn't what it's intended for, and the standard kit is hardly optimized for it.
2 comments
ewald 5387 days ago
Reference counting? Except for some basic types, like the string, you have to manually manage memory.

And the other point you are trying to make, I still don't get it. You imply that the guy is doing it wrong for using Delphi where speed is important, and you come here and say that Delphi is, indeed, a fast language.

What if speed is not what the language is intended for? If the language is intended for other purpose, and speed comes as a bonus, I don't know how that could be a bad thing.

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malbs 5387 days ago
Yeah unfortunately the actual Delphi compiler is stuck in stasis, and has received no love in terms of targeting newer cpu instructions like SSE etc, which is why C++ can achieve better performance these days, back in the day Delphi was as fast as C++ for general performance, and Delphi absolutely killed it in terms of productivity.

We started out as a TP shop, so there is code dating back to the 1980s that is still used today (=\)

The rumor is Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero lost the source code to the delphi compiler, which is the reason there had been no additions to the compiler, but who knows if that is legitimate, or should be an entry on snopes

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malbs 5387 days ago
strings are reference counted

dynamic arrays are reference counted

interfaces are reference counted (mostly for doing com stuff, however I've seen some examples of people trying to use interfaces as a cheap/dirty "i don't have to think about it" memory management tool, badly)

everything else is managed by yours truly

please enlighten us as to what you think Delphi is intended for, and what the standard kit is actually optimised for

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rbranson 5386 days ago
Reference counted memory management always involves some level of manual memory management. That's why garbage collection exists, because it's not really possible to get full coverage with ref-counting. Thanks for the education lesson though.

Personally, I think Delphi is for cutters.

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