Here 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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Graphics32 is a rich, high-performance 32bits graphics library for Delphi, with extensive capability. This showcase was submitted by Christian-W Budde, who is an active contributor to the Graphics32 project.
Weak references and their zeroing is managed in Delphi NextGen through a global hash table, with a global lock, see Arnaud Bouchez take on it:
Performance-issue-in-NextGen-ARC-model
Also apart from the global locking which itself is bad enough, there are a couple further performance issues:
Very experimental support for LLVM in DWScript is now in the googlecode repository, thanks to the efforts of Christian-W Budde.
This is the beginning of the opening of new realms of possibilities for DWS!
LLVM support is currently centered around jit compilation, and at the moment doesn’t extend much beyond the needs of the Mandelbrot demo (see below for what is supported right now).
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.