I never thought I would say this about the Basic language.... :-) But Real Software has made a pretty impressive product called REALBasic. When I read about this back in 2005, I didn't think they would be around for long. But to my surprise, they have been hammering away and improving REALBasic year-on-year. REALBasic overcomes many of the limitations we know about VB6 and has some impressive features - in the language and IDE. Including cross compiling for Linux, Windows and Mac, plus it's very easy to install. It also comes with a build-in profiler... See screen shot link. Damn, it would be nice having such a profiler for Free Pascal / Lazarus development tools. ;-)

REALBasic built-in profiler
http://www.realsoftware.com/images/profiler2.png

REALBasic product
http://www.realsoftware.com/products/realbasic/

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Just use valgrind/kcachegrind:
<http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/html/pics/KcgShot3Large.gif> ?

Here is a nice summary of language features and framework features.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REALbasic

and it has full Unicode support! ;-)

Graeme.

RealBasic has been around as long as I can remember. I used it on the Amiga 25 years ago.

I know a guy who develops comercial software in RB. Word is they "did a Borland" and let their quality really fall apart. Now they are struggling to recover.

Missing Firebird support! :-(

2008/11/25 Graeme Geldenhuys

Seconded! I discovered valgrind/kcachegrind only 3 weeks ago and it's fabulous! If you are interested at all in profiling your application then valgrind --tool=callgrind with the output file passed to kcachegrind has to be seen to be believed.

I've never used a profiler before so maybe my expectations are low, but man I was impressed.

I'm writing a compiler for an obscure uC interpreter and (being grossly inexperienced at writing compilers) a couple of runs of valgrind/kcachegrind allowed me to speed things up over 500% with less than 10 lines of code modified in my source (can you say "low hanging fruit"?).

Brad

Florian Klaempfl wrote

Just use valgrind/kcachegrind: <http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/html/pics/KcgShot3Large.gif> ?

That looks a lot more complicated and difficult to understand than the REALBasic image. The bottom left rectangle looks almost like the CPU circuitry under a microscope. :-) And I have no clue what that part actually represents.

And even thought FPC and Lazarus has support for 'gprof', I don't know of a single developer that managed to get it working under Linux. I tried numerous times before and searching my mailing list archive of 3 years I can see numerous other developers also being unsuccessful. I always get a blank output file. :-(

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

2008/11/25 Marc Geldon (SCALA IT) :

Missing Firebird support! :-(

Just a quick search revealed a *huge* about of extra plugins written by the RB communite. One site contained over 950 add-ons. I'm pretty sure somebody covered Firebird support already. :-)

Note:
Please don't get the wrong idea! I'm staying with the trusty FPC compiler and Lazarus IDE. I just found the REALBasic link by chance in GMail sponsored ads and was pretty impressed by how much they have improved since the last time I ,
- Graeme -

Brad Campbell wrote

Seconded! I discovered valgrind/kcachegrind only 3 weeks ago and it's fabulous! If you are interested at all in profiling your application then valgrind --tool=callgrind

Can you point me to a wiki page or document that explain how to use it with FPC under Linux? Or if you can email a short decription (steps) in how to get started using FPC? I would be very interested in profiling our product and tiOPF project.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Better http://kcachegrind.sourceforge.net/html/Shot1Large.html ?

Because everybody is using valgrind. I had no need to use gprof for years because valgrind is much better.

http://lazarusroad.blogspot.com/2007/09/using-valgrind-to-profile-fpc.html

Though fpc -h | grep valgrind shows everything one needs to know.

BTW: Just tried gprof under linux, works as described in the manual.

Jon Bertrand wrote

RealBasic has been around as long as I can remember. I used it on the Amiga 25 years ago.

Oh dear..
RealBasic..
Amiga..
25 years..

really? has it been that long. <shakes head and walks away>

Floola (the cross-platform iPod doovahickey is written in RealBasic - seems to work ok)

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

Here is a nice summary of language features and framework features. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REALbasic

Apparently the remote debugging support has to be seen to be believed.

Brad

Does anyone know about a Firebird add-on for RealBASIC? I don't want to use ODBC! :-)

2008/11/25 Graeme Geldenhuys

There is a basic native pascal profiler named fprofiler. It's in the fpcprojects section in SVN. The basics work although there are a lot of optimizations possible.
The profiler works by inserting timing calls in the actual code, by parsing it first. I wrote a wrapper for the compiler (named fpp) to handle that.

http://svn.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/fpprofiler/trunk/?root=fpcprojects

Would be nice to create an IDE addin for this tool for Lazarus at some point, never thought of that before.

Darius

Cool, I'll check it out. Thanks for the info.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Florian Klaempfl wrote

> Can you point me to a wiki page or document that explain how to use it > with FPC under Linux? http://lazarusroad.blogspot.com/2007/09/using-valgrind-to-profile-fpc.html

Thanks Florian, I'll try it out tomorrow at work. :-)

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

You can try OProfile http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/about/ too; no extra support in fpc needed, just compile your app with debug info enabled.

--David Pethes

David Pethes wrote

You can try OProfile http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/about/ too; no extra support in fpc needed, just compile your app with debug info enabled.

Thanks. It's amazing. A year ago, when I wanted to do profiling of my FPC apps, I couldn't find anything that works. Now I have an abundant choice of profiling tools. :-)

I'll find a place on the wiki to add all these available options. It's valuable information and some poor soul in the future doesn't have to struggle as much as I did. :-)

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Maybe you should have asked :) gprof works on linux for 10 years (on windows it is hairy) and valgrind support is also since 2.0 in FPC.

Florian Klaempfl wrote

Maybe you should have asked :) gprof works on linux for 10 years (on windows it is hairy) and valgrind support is also since 2.0 in FPC.

I did at the time, and nobody could help me with gprof. I then tried to use valgrind, but had no clue what to do or how it works, so just gave up and used a high precision timer over sections of my code. :-)

Anyway, thank you for the link to valgrind usage - I managed to get it working just fine. It gives a damn lot of information - now i just need to figure out what everything kcachegrind shows me means. But I see the valgrind website has a tutorial which i will work through. Thanks again.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

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Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

I never thought I would say this about the Basic language.... :-) But Real Software has made a pretty impressive product called REALBasic.

Easily confused with the rather older TrueBASIC.

I'm afraid that my memories of BASIC start off with bearded postgrads hunched over 'd be very reluctant to call something based on BASIC, COBOL or FORTRAN a viable alternative to Pascal. Don't judge a language by what's been grafted onto it, but by what's had to be chopped out to make it conform to current good practice.

I don't think RealBasic is a competitor to Lazarus for the following reasons:

1) They suffer with the same problem of huge executables, after downloading the trial, i build a simple form with a menu and a pushbutton and it creates an exe of 3200KB. With Lazarus 0.9.27 i create the same form, menu and button (after stripped) 1774KB.

2) The RB IDE use 200556KB of memory against 21256KB of Lazarus.

3) It costs $100 to $500.

4) If you don't need an IDE, but want to use Basic, you can use FreeBASIC for windows or linux, that is free.

Henrique.

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that is a very "easy" look on this issue!

If RealBasic would have a mySQL and Firebird support, it could be a real competitor ... also to Delphi!

I would switch or also use RealBasic if it would have native support of mySQL / Firebird.

2008/11/27 Marc Geldon (SCALA IT) :

Not that I want you to switch from the awesome FPC compiler and the Object Pascal language, but look at the following links.

MySQL
http://alacatialabs.com/products/realbasic-mysql-plugin/

Firebird (using the standard "cheap" edition)
http://forums.realsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16418&hilit=+firebird+api Alternatively you can use ODBC (unix and windows) as far as I understand.

PS:
Just because it isn't included as standard doesn't mean anything. Many Delphi developers use 3rd party (specialised) DB connection components instead of the stock ones.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

mmm. Not to me, it doesn't compile Object Pascal.

Leonardo M. Ram?
Griensu S.A. - Medical IT C?rdoba
Tel.: 0351 - 4247979

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