TMonitor vs TRTLCriticalSection

In this new episode of the TMonitor saga is a comparison of its locking features vs TRTLCriticalSection, aka the OS-supported critical section mechanism. Is it fair? is it fast?

Fairness means that if you have several threads attempting to lock the same resources, they’ll all get a chance and none of them gets the lion’s share. In other words, that there are no race conditions.

Speed is obvious, it’s about the overhead the locking mechanism incurs.

Edit 2013-08-24: looks like the issue discussed here should be resolved in XE5, cf Monitoring the Monitor by Allen Bauer.

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DWScript news roundup for June 2013

dws-mirrorHere is a summary of recent changes, language highlights are initial support for sets and a new Sort() method for dynamic arrays.

Apart form Linq & LLVM libraries which were previously mentioned, Brian Frost made multiple updates to the IDE Dialog. There were numerous other minor fixes and improvements, related to stability, performance and compatibility with Delphi code.
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Immutable strings… in Delphi?

One of the “novelties” of the NextGen Delphi compiler is immutable strings, which I find quite puzzling, for lack of a better word, given that Delphi already had reference-counted copy-on-write strings, and the NextGen compiler uses reference-counted strings.

I always considered that Delphi’s String type was one of its remaining strong points, being a high-level abstraction (higher than Java’s or .Net’s String/StringBuilder dichotomy) with excellent low-level performance (on par with C/C++  character arrays).

From the recent discussions, it appears many don’t know what makes/made Delphi String so special, so here is a quick summary.

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