The new IDE Fix Pack 5.9 adds support for RAD Studio XE8. It also fixes the long standing Code Insight bug QC 71270 (also 76338 and 76379) where the popup listbox doesn’t always show items with a double underscore or a “_Z”.

With XE8 the IDE comes with the Castalia IDE plugin. Unfortunately this causes the IDE to start a lot slower. IDE Fix Pack 5.9 addresses this performance bottleneck as you can see here.

Changelog:

• Fixed: FieldAddress optimization could fail if a published field name was also used in an ancestor
• Added: XE8 support
• Added: TStringList.IndexOfName optimization
• Added: Castalia XE8 startup optimization (XE8)
• Added: Fix for QC 71270, 76338 and 76379. “CodeInsight doesn’t like the underscore”.

IDE Fix Pack download:

fastdcc download:

The DDevExtensions 2.83 IDE plugin is now available for RAD Studio XE8.

The only change compared to 2.82 is that XE8 is supported.

DDevExtensions download:

A short screen capture video of XE8’s splash screen. It shows how fast the Castalia IDE plugin starts if the upcoming IDE Fix Pack for XE8 is installed.

Delphi’s NextGen compiler (Android, IOS) removed support for UTF8String, AnsiString and RawByteString. But if you look into System.pas you see that those types are still there but Embarcadero makes them inaccessible from outside of System.pas by prefixing them with an underscore that the compiler converts to the at-sign. And you can’t write “@UTF8String” as it is not a valid identifier.

By patching DCU files it is possible to make those hidden types accessible. And guess what, the compiler generates correct code for the “unsupported” strings.

The unit System.ByteStrings reintroduces:

• ShortString
• AnsiString
• AnsiChar
• PAnsiChar
• PPAnsiChar
• UTF8String
• PUTF8String
• RawByteString
• PRawByteString

Usage:
Add the System.ByteStrings.dcu’s path to the compiler’s search path and add the unit to your uses clauses.

There is no *.PAS file because the DCU is patched with a hex editor to get access to the hidden types.

With the new RAD Studio XE8, Embarcadero thought that Delphi looked too modern and the old CDE/Motif Java Swing style would look much more appropriate. XE8 also increased the font size of the main form including the menu bar, structure pane, object inspector, project manager, tool palette, call stack, …

Thanks to Daniel Wolf’s German blog post, I was able to restore the XE7 style. Unfortunately there is no simple configuration dialog in the IDE, so you have to make some changes to the registry by hand or download Daniel’s “wuppdi·StylerXE8” tool.

1. Quit XE8
2. Create a new file XE7StyleForXE8.reg file and paste the following content into it

   Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
   
   [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\16.0\ModernTheme]
   "FontName"="Segoe UI"
   "FontSize"=dword:00000009
   "MainToolBarColor"="clBtnFace"

3. Save the file and double click it so that the registry changes are applied to XE8.
4. Start XE8

The IDE uses the following default values if the “ModernTheme” registry key doesn’t exist.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Embarcadero\BDS\16.0\ModernTheme]
"FontName"="Segoe UI"
"FontSize"=dword:0000000a
"MainToolBarColor"="clGradientActiveCaption"

This is also described in the DocWiki.

Before:

After:

It all started with a new DDevExtensions feature I’m working on, or was working on before my JSON parser project took over. For this new feature I needed to write and read some information to and from a file. XML was out of question, so I came up with a “one line per entry” format. As the feature grew I “suddenly” needed to write more structured data. After trying to do that in a “one line per entry” format the I/O code became such a mess that I deleted it and came up with the idea to use JSON for the file.

After browsing the web and looking into the different JSON parsers for Delphi, I decided that I didn’t need such complicated and feature rich parsers and it would be fun to write my own parser. So I started, not knowing that my class names would be the same of Delphi’s JSON parser, because I never looked into it before I started benchmarking my parser against it.

And here we are. The DDevExtensions feature is on halt and my brand new JSON parser is available on GitHub. It uses a lot of low level tricks to get as much performance out of the different Delphi compilers and RTL and beats Delphi’s JSON parser in performance and memory usage, by far.

Features

• Fast dual JSON parser for parsing UTF8 and UTF16 without conversion
• Automatic creation of arrays and objects
• Easy access mode with implicit operators
• Compact and formatted output modes
• Win32, Win64 and ARM Android support (MacOS and iOS may work)
• Supports Delphi 2009-XE7

Some internal tricks:

• Elimination of unnecessary _UStrAsg and _UStrClr calls, reduces CPU locks
• ARC: Faster ARC handling by doing it by hand without the virtual method calls (RSP-9712)
• Storing string literals where possible instead of creating a heap string for them
• Caching the last string literal pointer for faster repeated name access. Broken in XE7 (RSP-10015)
• Specialized own StringBuilder implementation that doesn’t need to copy the buffer to the final string
• Fast String to Int64 conversion implemented in assembler for x86 and x64
• Fast String to Double conversion

A new release of IDE Fix Pack for RAD Studio 2009-XE7 is available. The new version 5.8 is available for all versions including the versions that I marked “unsupported”. So all 2010, XE2-XE5 users can update from version 5.5 to 5.8 what gives them the “EditorLineEnd.ttr” patch.

This release brings a major performance improvement. If you have large packages with dependencies to other large packages, the compiler spends a lot of time in cleaning up the unit dependencies what can result in a long delay (up to 5 seconds) after you hit a syntax error in the active package project. IDE Fix Pack addresses this bottle neck and reduces the delay to less than half a second.

One of the RAD Studio 2009 .NET code patches in IDE Fix Pack caused the IDE to run into a NullReferenceException when started on Windows 8.1. This patch is now disabled if Windows 8.1 or newer is detected.

If you have copied the rlink32.dll from XE7 to an older RAD Studio version to bypass the “too many resources to handle” linker error, the IDE Fix Pack will now skip its own rlink32.dll patch as it isn’t necessary for XE7’s rlink32.dll.

Some people had problems with installing IDE Fix Pack because the installer is compiled against rtlXxx.bpl and vclXxx.bpl. And if those packages aren’t in the PATH environment variable the Installer failed with the usual standard Windows error message. To work around this issue and not to increase the IDE Fix Pack’s installer’s file size (I know, who cares), I have rewritten the installer in plain “old” WinAPI.

The new IDE Fix Pack changes the behavior of the [F6] (IDE Insight) key in XE5 and newer. If you press [F6] in the editor, IDE Fix Pack will now call “SelectAll” on the IDE Insight edit control so that you can overwrite the old edit text without doing the selection yourself.

IDE Fix Pack Downloads:

fastdcc Downloads:

Changelog:

• Fixed: IDE Fix Pack tried to patch the fastdcc32/64/aarm.exe if it was renamed to dcc32/64/aarm.exe (XE6-XE7)
• Fixed: Windows 8.1 compatibility with .NET code patch (2009)
• Added: Compiler cleanup code performance optimization for large packages (2009-XE7)
• Added: If XE7’s rlink32.dll is detected in older Delphi versions the “too many resources to handle” patch is skipped
• Added: IDE Insight [F6]-Key calls SelectAll (XE5-XE7)
• Improved: IDE Fix Pack StringLists use CompareStringOrdinal instead of CompareString
• Changed: Installer/Uninstaller doesn’t require rtl.bpl/vcl.bpl in the PATH anymore

I use and have used the following tools when I work on my IDE Fix Pack plugin.

• BDS 2006/2007, RAD Studio 2009-XE7 + Debugger
• WinDbg
• .NET CLR Debugger, ildasm, Reflector/ILSpy for ErrorInsight patches in 2006-2010
• HxD (hex editor) to find byte sequence or parts of it from one Delphi version in the other Delphi versions
• Gigabyte’s EasyTune to limit my CPU speed to 800 MHz to catch performance bottlenecks.
• ProcessMonitor to find I/O and Registry performance bottlenecks
• DelphiF12HotKeySupport for performance bottlenecks (not working under Win 8.x but I have my Win 7 VM)
• DebuggerCallStackResolver (private tool) to use jdbg files and dbghelp.dll for better call stacks and a more descriptive CPU-View
• “CPU-View to FindMethod” (private tool) to convert the CPU-View listing to an “array of SmallInt” (using “-1” as a wildcard) that is used by my FindMethod function to find the byte sequences in memory.

Where is IDA Pro? – I don’t use it.

During the search for all function parameter name mangling changes in XE7, I disabled many IDE Fix Pack patches and forgot to enable them before I released version 5.7 for XE7. So here is version 5.71 that enables all patches again.

By enabling all the patches, I found three patches that weren’t necessary anymore or only partly necessary. Embarcadero fixed the rlink32.dll maximum resources limitation (QC 111917) and the debugger local variable watch memory leak (QC 115248). Furthermore they partly fixed the “operator In” class completion bug (QC 102047). Only the “complete implementation” part that is explained in the QC entry is fixed, the “complete interface” part still uses “&In” instead of “In”, IDE Fix Pack 5.7 fixes the missing part for you.

Download:

Download:

I’ve re-released the IDE Fix Pack 5.7, DDevExtensions 2.82 and DFMCheck 1.5 versions with support for XE7. The only change is that X7 is now supported (and one compiler patch was removed from IDE Fix Pack because it is fixed in XE7). Other than that it was just adjusting the build script, adjusting to the new ABI (name mangling of interface function parameters has changed) and building the projects.

IDE Fix Pack download:

fastdcc download:

DDevExtensions download:

DFCheck download: