Porting to Tiburón, part 1

published: Wed, 6-Aug-2008   |   updated: Thu, 7-Aug-2008

We're slowly getting released from at least part of our NDA with Embarcadero so that we can talk a little about Delphi 2009, codename Tiburón.

Being as I'm yer actual CTO with DevExpress, one of if not the biggest third-party VCL component vendors, I get to play with the new toy before many others. Several times a month, in fact. Betas are popping out like rabbits in a lush green field. To say Delphi R&D have been going through smacking bugs in the bug reporting system like Orkin does with the ants in my garden is an understatement.

Only a couple of days ago, some of us were asked to discuss Tiburón publicly after we'd used it for a while. Well, "a while" for me is a couple of recent evenings, playing with it using my particular codebases.

I duped a nice clean Windows XP virtual machine (VM) and installed the latest beta on it. OK, it was a VM and, to alleciate that a little, I do have a fast four-core 64-bit monster of a machine, but the install was nevertheless nice and rapid. Delphi 2007 was a little slothful, shall we say, about installing, but Tiburón was decidedly snappy. So much so, that your intrepid reporter didn't even make a note of how quick it was to install. Doh! I did some other simple work that was on my plate and the next thing I noticed was the install was complete. In the order of 10 minutes, perhaps. Now, agreed I didn't install the C++Builder personality, nor was there any help install with this particular beta, but this was certainly a major leap in the right direction.

I then loaded my venerable EZDSL library into the IDE and recompiled it.

One hint, no errors, and that was it. It was really boring. Honestly, I was flexing my mental and authorial muscles ready to desk check my string usage, modify it, and then talk at length about it, but there was nothing to do. Damn.

So, apart from adding another compiler option block for Delphi 2009 ($IFDEF VER200, don'tcha know), all I had to do was remove the word "packed" from a single record type definition. To be honest I don't think even that was needed, so I've got a query on the internal newsgroups about it.

Well then, er, sorry, but there's no big story about burning the midnight oil on this one. EZDSL works with Delphi 1 through Delphi 2009, at least in my VM, without very much ado at all.

The test programs though, gaak, what a mess; compiler warnings all over the place. To be expected somewhat since I'd been mixing short and long strings willy-nilly in there, so next time I'll talk about how I fixed all that. And of course, I'll be porting my book's code as well, so stay tuned.