On 2014/01/22 23:33, dean gwilliam wrote:
I'm just wondering what my options are here?
Any advice much appreciated.
Firstly, high-five on using D5 - All the High-speed Pascal/C /Assembler coding goodness with none of the fat (as far as 32-bit goes
anyway) - I use it all the time for critical/server side apps or services, and XE3 or newer for RAD stuff. I use D5/XE libraries
from open sources but adapted over time (which you are welcome to have) all working exceptionally well.
Biggest stumbling block for us on D5 is no natively supported UTF8 strings... the type "String" in D5 still aliased to AnsiString
which is not MBCS/Unicode compatible, or at least, suitable converters did not exist at the time. In Later versions (2009 onwards)
"String" started referring to "WideString" or now the newest native type: "UTF8String" - all capable of Unicode seamless conversion,
so no problem these days. When using D5 I simply don't consider it for systems with Unicode requirements, or run it through explicit
converters (which adds some cycles but still get the job done pretty fast). Of course it is only one thing solved to be able to
store a Unicode anything in a DB, but it also lacks the ability to display it correctly in, say, a TLabel or TEdit sans native
Unicode-string properties. (Again - all fixed since 2009).
As an aside: for-loops had a really bad implementation in D5 (a fix from earlier versions went slower by an order of magnitude, it
was fixed again in D7 I think) - best to use while-do or repeat-until loops for speedy needs. It really is time to lay D5 to rest,
but it still is my favourite toy.
Fascinating article here on String history in Delphi:
http://www.codexterity.com/delphistrings.htm
On the IDE side, D5 IDE does not keep revision history or integrate SVN in any way and profilers/memory leak checkers exist but are
not included natively.
These mentioned problems aside, it's still one of the sleekest compilers around producing sub-350KB optimized exe's for a
hello-world full windows-forms application and compiles rock-steady huge applications in milliseconds every time, making the
altering/testing/debugging cycle the biggest pleasure.
Oh yes - plus.... D5/D7 is free nowdays. (Or rather, officially it does not exist anymore, neither any official legal controls for
it) which makes it great for start-up devs shying away from the 4000+ dollar XE[n] behemoths.
Hope some of this helps!
Ryan
_______________________________________________
sqlite-users mailing list
sqlite-users@sqlite.org
http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
