Hello together!

I've just found the following blog article by the mORMot developer which links to an article by Marco Cantu about language changes introduced in the new iOS compiler and further upcoming changes.

Blog article:
http://blog.synopse.info/post/2013/05/11/Delphi-XE4-NextGen-compiler-is-disapointing Marco Cantu's article:
http://www.embarcadero.com/resources/white-papers/application-development?download=102

Especially the points about (currently) different features for different compilers and again ignored backwards compatibility annoy the hell out of me...

Regards,
Sven

And somehow I have the feeling that we should discuss the topic of Delphi compatibility on the hackathon...

Regards,
Sven

While all this seems to turn out as a major mess, I would like to see "$ZEROBASEDSTRINGS" in fpc, as well.

-Michael

They say the need for supporting limited resources is the motivation for language changes and then they *force* using UTF16 instead of UTF8 (or ANSI) as the only possible string code.

Very queer.

-Michael

While all this seems to turn out as a major mess, I would like to see "$ZEROBASEDSTRINGS" in fpc, as well.

In fact we should provide as many FPC/Lazarus versions *as* new Delphi versions introduce breaking changes. Some of the changes (from Ansi to Unicode, from VCL to FM, from one- to zero-based strings...) require different RTL/FCL/LCL versions, which cannot be covered in a single FPC/Lazarus version.

DoDi

Michael Schnell wrote

While all this seems to turn out as a major mess, I would like to see "$ZEROBASEDSTRINGS" in fpc, as well.

Was already added by Florian in November (revision 22933)

Regards,
Sven

In fact FPC already supports zerobasedstrings and FireMonkey is just another GUI framework like VCL, LCL, fpGUI and MSEgui. Additional versions would mean additional maintainence burden and this is something that we could not stem affordably with the current team size... (guess why we only support the last release of FPC...)

Regards,
Sven

Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote

. Some of the changes (from Ansi to Unicode, from VCL to FM, from one- to zero-based strings...) require different RTL/FCL/LCL versions, which cannot be covered in a single FPC/Lazarus version.

I did not expect that after Delphi introduced the "NewStrings" - that (rather decently) allow for mixing strings with different internal codes, while leaving some room for compatible improvement (such as an additional fully dynamic coded string type-variant and 16 and 32 Bit RAW Strings) - Strings still are a moving target and yet another incompatible change will be forced on the users.

I would not dare to decide a direction for Lazarus on that behalf.

-Michael

In our previous episode, Sven Barth said:

Not relevant till they push nextgen (in this state) to mainstream. Till then, I would regard XE4 for iOS simply the same as other non mainstream Delphi products (.NET/Prism etc)

Sven Barth wrote

Was already added by Florian in November (revision 22933)

Great !
He seems to be a very skilled prophet :-)

-Michael

They say the need for supporting limited resources is the motivation for language changes and then they *force* using UTF16 instead of UTF8 (or ANSI) as the only possible string code.

Very queer.

-Michael