ZJDBGPack re-release

ZJDBGPack is again available, but as an independent download (it used to be bundled with SamplingProfiler).

This is a command-line utility intended for use in a build process or from the Delphi tools menu, whose purpose is to integrate debug information into an executable. The debug information format  is a compressed version of JCL‘s JDBG.

As of know, SamplingProfiler is the only published utility that understands this format, so you can use it either to reduce the size of the executables you deploy for profiling purposes, or if you do not want to deploy directly-readable debug information files.

SamplingProfiler 1.7.0 still hot from the compiler

SamplingProfiler v1.7.0 is now available, you can get the zip and release details from its changelog page.

As announced last week, the changes are a fix for a bug that could drastically affect the execution speed of the profiled application when relying on MAP files for debug information, if you were hit by this bug, things should be like night and day with this version (and hopefully I didn’t break anything else in the process…).

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Delphi 2009 hidden compiler switch?

This morning while debugging a statistical ichthyo-parser I stumbled upon what looked like a Delphi 2009 compiler bug: the compiler was outputting gibberish ASM opcodes… But after further investigations, it appeared this wasn’t completely gibberish, but that it was (somewhat) correct MSIL bytecode!

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Website getting up to speed

I’ve reorganized the site a bit since the relocation, tweaked WordPress behind the scenes, added OpenID support for comments and hopefully sorted out the over-aggressive spam filter.

The support forums are no longer available now also hosted here, no OpenID support for them just yet, but I’ll enable it as soon as it’s out of beta. For bug reports and features/suggestions, the forums are the place to post (easier to track things).

There will likely be a new SamplingProfiler release in the next days, which will add support for CPU-usage-based sampling, ie. profiling only takes place when the CPU usage goes above above a treshold (either at the system or the process level).

MapFileStats public release

mapfilestatsMapFileStats is a simple free utility to obtain executable binary size statistics derived from a “.map” file.

Use it to know which units contribute the most to an executable’s size, which DFMs are the largest, which units you have dependencies on but barely use in your executable, or merely to know exactly what gets into your executable.

You can integrate it into the Delphi IDE via the Tools menu, see the MapFileStats page for more details or to the download page and see for yourself!