Delphi IDE and RTL/VCL performance improvements

Lately, there's been a lot of effort put into improving the Delphi IDE's UX and I wanted to comment briefly that in the past week alone we've made some great progress. For example, there have been recent improvements in:

IDE flicker (now nearly flicker free)
Desktop switching performance
GDI resource management
Moving controls on the form designer via the keyboard
Form designer grid repaint issues
Compiler time stamp access (thanks to Andreas Hausladen)
VCL control painting (thanks to Pierre le Riche)
VCL control data handling performance
FastCode routines added to the RTL (btw, a huge thanks to the whole FastCode crew who contribute to this great project benefiting us all)

One of the best things about a number of these fixes is that they're in the RTL/VCL so your applications will benefit as well. Btw, several of them came from QC so it definitely pays off to get your bugs logged. Anyway, we're cranking away and there's more to come but I'm pleased with the progress and thought it was worth mentioning.

Comments [10]

permalink Posted @ 11:12PM

Friday, February 09, 2007 12:53:27 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Really good news! Thank you! Can't wait to see all this in action.

Igor Skomorokh

Friday, February 09, 2007 1:19:10 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Great !

Believe me... for me these are VERY good news.. ;-)
I wish that the new IDE will acomplish the spectations that are starting to grow in me. ;-)
Just only to know... do you remember the list of "The Top Ten Niggling, Irritating, and Downright Bad IDE Bugs List"
that where proposed and later published at the Nick Hodges Blog (http://blogs.borland.com/nickhodges/archive/2006/07/21/26121.aspx)
are they being fixed ? (Please don't missunderstand me, it is a polite question, English is not my native language and maybe I can't find the correct words to ask this question)

Anywat my compliments for your effords with the improvements stated in this post.

Lluis (Albert Research)

Friday, February 09, 2007 5:16:52 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Very good news. Keep up the good work!

Atle

Friday, February 09, 2007 7:18:30 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Lluis,
From Nick's list only three items remain open and I know that at least one is actively under investigation.

Steve Trefethen

Friday, February 09, 2007 9:08:49 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Good ! ;-) Thank you for your answer... Have a nice weekend :-)

Lluis (Albert Research)

Friday, February 09, 2007 9:34:29 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I started Delphi 6 last week to debug some old code, and It's SO fast ... it made me see how slow Delphi2006's IDE is (in everything , from startup to shutdown).

Delphite

Monday, February 12, 2007 5:36:26 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I am confused, are these performance enhancements part of the recent hotfixes released in the last few days?

Jeff Carbello

Monday, February 12, 2007 5:37:06 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

What new FastCode functions were added to the RTL?

Jeff Carbello

Tuesday, February 13, 2007 9:43:10 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Jeff,
Sorry for any confusion but no, the changes mentioned above are for the next release of Delphi that's not to say they'll never appear in a hotfix for BDS 2006 but not at present (I don't make those decisions).

Regarding the RTL routines I don't want to list what's been replaced since the product is under development and the list could change which would not put me in a very good position.

Steve Trefethen

Friday, February 16, 2007 7:22:13 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Steve, thanks for the clarification. I understand the need to not release information about upcoming features in the next version. I do hope to see these fixes applied to D2006.

Jeff Carbello

Comments are closed.