The FreePascal version of DWScript has been stalled for a little while on the incomplete UnicodeString (utf-16) support among other things.
It’s hard to blame the FreePascal team for that, given that Linux is primarily utf-8, and that utf-8 has quite a few advantages over utf-16.
As posted on Google+, Smart Mobile Studio is now free for educational purposes.
The Pascal Programming for Schools website had already been updated sometime ago with samples and tutorials about getting started with Smart, and is a significant online resource for teaching Pascal in general, not just Smart.
I’ve closed the mini-pool, below are the results, obtained after 500 respondents, as well as some other stats not obviously evident from the poll results (as it was a multi-choice poll).*
They’re of course only relevant as the measurement to the audience of this site.
(more…)
…or at Work if your prefer.
This is a small poll to gauge the audience of this site,, try to answer about the environments you use for production, not for experimenting, testing or fiddling.
If you use several version, feel free to check as many entries as you feel are relevant.
Work and processing classes are typically short-lived, created to perform one form of processing or another then freed. They can be simple collections, handle I/O of one kind of another, perform computations, pattern matching, etc.
When they’re used for simple workloads, their short-lived temporary nature can sometimes become a performance problem.
(more…)
DWScript SVN version will now compile and run under XE5.
There is only one gotcha due to an XE5 regression.
In DWScript WebServer in the metered cloud, I mentioned setting up a light weight Windows 2008 r2 Virtual Private Server to serve as web server host.
A parallel series of articles deals with the DWScript Web Server itself, and this is a mini-series about setting up Windows 2008 with minimal memory, CPU, storage and vulnerability surface.
Implementing an efficient worker thread pool in Windows can be achieved through the use of IOCP, which is the barbaric acronym for (just as barbaric) Input/Output Completion Port API introduced by Microsoft a while ago.
To make use of IOCP, one has to deal with further barbaric API functions, but the principles are (somewhat) more civilized, and the implementation is quite straightforward.
The DWS Web Server pre-compiled binary has been updated, it is now packaged in an InnoSetup installer, comes with SQLite 3.8.0.2 and other changes (see below).
The installer is still rather simple, but includes command files for service installataion/uninstallation, link to online documentations and an uninstaller. The previous Getting Started guide still applies, but is thus simplified.
A pre-compiled server executable is available from google code (1008 kB), built from current trunk version.
edit 2013-08-30: the zip has now been replaced by a proper installer
Below is a quick start guide to playing with that server, I hope to later find time for more complete guide up to setting up a complete “production server”.