A first v0.1 preview of cefHtmlSnapshot is now available at https://github.com/EricGrange/cefHtmlSnapshot.
This is a command-line utility that aims to take image (PNG, JPG) or PDF snapshots of an HTML website or file, and fill in the “void” left by the abandon of Qt webkit tools like phantomjs or wkhtml2pdf. While those old utilities still work, they do not support modern web standards, and any tidbit of ECMA6 will have them stumble.
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Units to support the TurboJPEG library is now available in the DWScript repository, you can find the relevant files in the Libraries\GraphicsLib folder, they have been tested with Delphi 10.3 in both Win32 and Win64. The DLLs are those of the latest 2.05 version.
The TurboJPEG library (aka “libjpeg-turbo”) provides a fast implementation of the libjpeg API, but the files here target the TurboJPEG core, rather than the libjpeg compatibility layer (see its documention).
The TurboJPEG API is less rich, but quite simple to use and very convenient.
Committed to daNeuralNet a first working version of a JIT for matrix-vector multiplication that relies on the FMA instruction set (Fused Multiply and Addition).
This version generates code that is up to twice faster than the OpenBLAS for matrix sizes up to CPU cache size (100×100 to 200×200 usually), and maintains a marginal lead for larger sizes, though those are bound by memory bandwidth. The performance profile is similar on both AMD and Intel CPUs.
A test version of SamplingProfiler 64bit is available here (3.2 MB).
It has only been tested with 64bit binaries compiled by Delphi 10.3 and detailed map files. It should work with other Delphi version, (TD32 and other debug information formats have not been tested yet).
There other known issues with stack traces from DLLs, so it is rough around the edges but should be functional.
Just created a new repository with a “LibCBLAS” unit meant to use the OpenBLAS library in its Windows 64bit incarnation from Delphi 10.3+
https://bitbucket.org/egrange/libcblas/
OpenBLAS is an optimized BLAS library (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms), the DLL itself can be obtained from the “xianyi” repository where pre-compiled Windows DLL are maintained.
I recently dusted off an artificial neural network project, now published at https://bitbucket.org/egrange/daneuralnet/. This is a subject I’ve been dabbling on and off since the days of 8 bit CPUs.
The goals of the project are twofold: first experiment with neural networks that would be practical to run and train on current CPUs, and second experiment with JIT compilation of neural networks maths with Delphi.
TensorFlow and Python are cool, but they feel a bit too much like Minecraft, another sandbox of ready-made blocks 😉
Update: should now be available, BitBucket staff was very responsive, and Sophos AV as well. Two false positives remain by VBA32 and Cylance, which do not appear to have proper mechanisms to report false positive (not very professional for an AV vendor IMHO).
Support for BigInteger type in SmartPascal is being added in the DWScript repository, it is mapped to the new BigInt JavaScript type which is now supported by the major browsers.
This is going to be a work in progress over a few weeks. In part because the JS implementation is rather bare-bones with few support functions, and in part because with the BigInt type, the JS designers did away with some automated and implicit casting (uh?).
While refactoring a bit the way some “special” functions were handled in DWScript, I came about a case where the compiler started accepting strings as Math functions parameters.
While this comes naturally as an “interesting” side-effects of automatic typecasts, it left a feeling of “wrongness”, accepting literal code like Abs(“foo”) and then failing at run-time is asking for trouble.
When in a multi-monitor context with monitors having varying DPI settings, TForm.SetBounds can be a little ambiguous when combined with form scaling.
The issue comes from Width / Height, in Delphi 10.3.1, they are understood as applying to the monitor the form is currently one, not the monitor SetBounds could be moving the form to. This is manifest when restoring a form position: if you store a form’s bounds, then try to restore it with SetBounds, it will result in an incorrectly sized form.