Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Delphi Compiler Speed

Since it was released in 1995, one of Delphi's defining features has been its lightning-fast compiler. And now Embarcadero is telling us that the compiler is even faster in Delphi 10.4.2 and faster still in Delphi 11.

This seems like something we can test.



Sunday, October 31, 2021

Delphi Executable File Size

A friend asked if I had noticed that the size of executables generated by the latest version of Delphi (Delphi 11 Alexandria), seemed smaller than in the previous version.

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

So You Want to Install the BDE...

I'm surprised how often the BDE still comes up in different Delphi programming discussions. People asking how to install it in recent versions of Delphi and even some who say they're using it for new development. Wild.

The documentation isn't all in one place and I keep having to look it up, so I thought I'd write it down.


Saturday, April 3, 2021

Curated List of Delphi Books

I don't know who needs to hear this, but there are lots of modern, up to date books published about Delphi and Pascal with more being written all the time.


Wednesday, March 24, 2021

FireMonkey 3D - Sun, Earth and Moon

Following up on an earlier post, Simple FireMonkey 3D, I'm going to make a simplified model of the solar system to explore multiple 3D objects interacting with each other in a scene. I'll also play around a little with light sources.



Friday, February 19, 2021

Firemonkey Particles

We see images with connected points used a lot in diagrams, illustrations, advertising and just cool abstract art. They visually represent networks of related things and ideas or connectivity. The web, for example. It's effective and visually appealing and when the effect is animated, it's mesmerising. And popular. There are any number of animated backgrounds and JavaScript libraries to add moving particles to web pages, including the very appropriately named particles.js.

I'm going to make a Delphi version using FireMonkey.


Thursday, January 28, 2021

Quick and Dirty FireMonkey Donut Gauge

Someone was asking where they could find gauge style chart components for FireMonkey like the ones you might see on a dashboard. They even helpfully posted some pictures.

At least one of these looks like it would be easy to reproduce without any third party components.


Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Simple FireMonkey 3D

Creating 3D software is undeniably cool, but it might be intimidating, what with all of the math and unfamiliar concepts. And the math...

Fortunately, FireMonkey does a lot of the heavy lifting for us. You can get started while writing little or no code and still have the option of digging deeper when you need to. It's a familiar concept for Delphi developers.

We'll create a simple FireMonkey 3D application and explore some of the basics.