Before I can install XE6 I have to uninstall some older versions of RAD Studio because I will run out of disk space on my SSD when I install XE6. The newer the Delphi version is the more disk space it takes, mainly due to the variety of supported platforms (Win32 debug/Win32 release/Win64 debug/…) After installing XE5 I was left with 12 GB free disk space (all the installation image in ProgramData are moved to my HDD) and half a year later I’m down to 6 GB.
I won’t be able to support my IDE plugins for some older RAD Studio versions the moment I uninstall them.
Why not move the older IDEs to another disk and hard link them?
I use the disk space issue as a way out of supporting all those versions with all their compilers dcc32.dll, dcc32.exe, dcc64.dll, dcc64.exe, dccaarm.exe. Do the math. I have to spend too much time doing the research for ever compiler. I have the feeling that the C/C++ compiler that is used to compile the Delphi compilers changes the CPU register allocation with every version, what breaks my “byte sequences” that are used to find the hook addresses. Furthermore I have to test every patch with every version and all compilers before I can release it.
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Supported: RAD Studio 2009 (I use it at work)
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Unsupported: RAD Studio 2010 (extra research costs)
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Supported: RAD Studio XE (I use it for all my personal projects)
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Unsupported: RAD Studio XE2 (only used it for IDEFixPack and DDevEx, obsolete with XE3)
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Unsupported: RAD Studio XE3 (only used it for IDEFixPack and DDevEx, obsolete with XE4)
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Unsupported: RAD Studio XE4 (only used it for IDEFixPack and DDevEx, obsolete with XE5)
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Supported: RAD Studio XE5 (supported until XE7 comes out)
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Supported: RAD Studio XE6 (not yet)
Thank you for keeping XE supported. This is the version I prefer for my projects as well.
I would be very interested to hear why you still favour Delphi XE. We still use it as our (Windows development) workhorse as well, with XE5 for mobile stuff.
Out of my head I would say:
1.) I stopped migrating my own components to newer versions.
2.) Because if 1.) I didn’t migrate my projects to newer versions.
3.) Produced binary files are relatively small
4.) Compiler is much faster
5.) IDE is stable and starts much faster (copy projection doesn’t take longer than the actual startup code)
6.) Except for Win64 there are no new features in newer versions that I would need.
+1 for all those.
Except for a single XE2 license for 64-bit support, we are using XE everywhere in my company. After XE it was clear where things were going so luckily I terminated all our SAs. Every new release since then has proven my decision correct.
Anyway, thanks for your great work. Each time I start Delphi I send you a thankful thought; It starts in less than a second when run from an SSD 🙂
Great about XE support, that’s also where I’m (stuck).
To your list, I would add the following:
7) no more floating designer (I like to see form/module and code at same time, and I’ve got 3 displays, so plenty of screen real estate).
8) no weirdness in the RTL (TBytes and the like)
9) I could use Win64, but 64bit debugger isn’t stable, which added to the slow IDE startups and slow 64bit compiler makes it just unpleasant.
Since you mentioned XE6, did they announce a release window or something? We’re really interesting in Android development and XE5 is slow as a turtle…
XE6 has just been released yesterday. You can find the announcement on the E. site (probably everywhere now).
Like Andreas XE is our latest and greatest, we are not excited about anything after XE and since mobile and 64bit isn’t going to happen at our place we are going to stick with XE until they finally come up with something ‘good’ and not as expensive (I have my doubts we are ever going to upgrade).
thank you for all that work.
Will be interesting to see what the FixPack does bring as extra speed for XE6. The compiler speed was significantly improved (specially dcc64) by Embarcadero. We used until now XE3 but will switch soon to XE6.
Great about the XE. Congratz and thank you for all the work!
Was wondering if there is an feature in the FixPack or DDevExtensions for XE6 to bring back the Embedded Designer option that was removed from the Form Designer Options screen?
There is not.
Hi Andreas, thank you very much for all your work over the years dealing with Delphi.
I would like to suggest a way to deal with your SSD space issue if you don’t already know about it. When I install Delphi I install it to my non-SSD drive which is D:\DelphiXE5. I then cut/paste the bin and lib folders to my SSD drive which is C:\DelphiXE5\bin and C:\DelphiXE5\lib\win32\release (I only install Win32). I then create a junction point using Microsoft Sysinternals’ Junction app from D:\DelphiXE5\bin to C:\DelphiXE5\bin and D:\DelphiXE5\lib\win32\ to C:\DelphiXE5\lib\win32\. That way DelphiXE5 runs from the SSD but all the other stuff like the help runs from a non-SSD drive.
If you don’t have a non-SSD drive then this comment might help someone else dealing with space issues on a SSD.
I kept on installing new versions on the same machine.
But before running out of disk space, I ran out of space in the PATH environment variable, because I had a bunch of these paths per installed version:
You’ll get a block of 4 paths that are added per installation:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\14.0\bin;
C:\Users\Public\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\14.0\Bpl;
C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\14.0\bin64;
C:\Users\Public\Documents\Embarcadero\Studio\14.0\Bpl\Win64;