The Lair of the Pythia

I still haven’t got the Win32 Turbo Professional up and running, but I have made some progress in looking at the freebies you get with the Professional upgrade. Some of them appear to be just demos – CodeHealer has a note in the install package that tells you this. But the authors of these packages sometimes make demos available off their web sites. Which is how come I have been playing with Castalia inside my copy of Delphi 7.

Castalia is essentially a productivity tool. It does a whole bunch of things that I’ve been wishing that the Delphi IDE did for you. You get line numbers, you get structural highlighting, you get block indentation, you get bookmarks, and so on. I’m hooked already, and I haven’t even started looking at things like the refactoring tools.

Of course it is easy to say that these are all things that the IDE should do, and that CodeGear ought to provide them. But if they did then they would be just like Microsoft, wouldn’t they? I kind of like the fact that they allow space for the little guy.

Besides, Castalia is only $67. The only reason I haven’t bought a copy yet is that their web site implies that you have to buy a different product depending on which version of Delphi you have, and I don’t know whether the copy that came with the Turbo Professional upgrade is a full version or just the demo. Still, that will give me an incentive to get the Turbo up and running before the 30 days of the Castalia demo license runs out.

Oh, and while you are at Castalia’s web site, take a look at the VCL Component Suite too. There is some interesting stuff there, and I expect I’ll end up buying that too because I need to learn how to do multi-threading.

I’ve got email from CodeGear telling me that the special offer on upgrades to the Professional versions of the Turbos has been extended to February 28th. Nice to know that’s official. As I’ve said before, upgrading to Professional ought to be a no-brainer, because sooner or later you’ll want to include a third-party package (or at least look at a demo of one). The only real downside is that with the free Explorer versions you can have more than one Turbo on the same machine (using TurboMerger), but once you have upgraded to Professional it is only one compiler per machine.

Better get on with looking at the free stuff you get with the Professional upgrade, hadn’t I.

Thanks to the suggestion by Craig Stuntz (here) I have been spending some time playing with the performance monitoring tools provided by Windows. I gather much of this lot came in with NT, which makes me a little less embarrassed about not knowing about it. The last time I looked seriously at Windows programming it was still (ahem!) Windows 95.
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So, having done all that work testing individual functions and come up with a complete blank as to what could be the problem, I tried running the software on a different computer. The Turbo-compiled version was still slower, but only by about 30 seconds over a half hour run, not the 30-50% difference I noticed before. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what Windows can do to you. It does so much helpful work in the background that you can never be quite sure what it is really up to.

Still, I did manage to learn quite a lot along the way. Also I now have some good evidence that the software is swapping memory to disc during runs. I wonder if there is any way to monitor that. Is there a useful utility out there that watches memory caching and tells you what your program does? I think that would be useful.

Yesterday Nick Hodges posted a useful list of sites containing Delphi tutorials. I haven’t had time to go through them in any detail, but if Nick says they are OK I’m sure that they must be. They are now all listed in the Links section of this site.

No progress on the install as yet, because it occurred to me that there is no point in getting the software to compile under the Turbo if it is going to be a lot slower. The client won’t be at all happy with me. So I’ve been spending a day or two trying to work out what the heck the problem is. It has been “interesting”.
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Well, urgent development job over, I can now get back to looking at the Turbos.

I do have the free versions of the Delphi compilers running on my back-up machine. While it doesn’t have enough poke for general development, I can at least compile the software on it. So I have been doing some back-to-back testing. The code for my program, developed under Delphi 7, compiles and runs just fine under the Win32 Turbo. It is also of similar size. But for some reason the code generated by the Turbo is between 30% and 50% slower. I’m mystified.

Timing code on a Windows platform is, of course, very much a hit-and-miss affair. Back in the days of single-thread operating systems you could get profilers that would tell you in detail just how fast your code was running. But under Windows you never quite know when processor time is being stolen by some other process. The only thing you can do is make lots of runs and look at averages, trying to keep what is happening on the rest machine down to a minimum. Even with all of these caveats, the Win32 Turbo code is markedly slower than that produced by Delphi 7.

I’ve been playing with compiler directives to see if something like having debug options set, or range checking, or something similar might be an issue, but none of that seems to have any substantial effect.

Has anyone else out there experienced this sort of thing, or know something about differences between BDS 2006 and Delphi 7 that might explain it? My program does a lot of floating point math. I don’t know if that helps track down the issue.

Meanwhile I’m hoping that at the weekend I can get back to trying to get the Turbo running on my main machine. I would at least like to know what is causing the odd behavior I reported here. As it is clearly machine-related, I guess I’ll have to start stripping out other software.

Update: Mystery solved (sort of). See here and here.

Well, thanks to the tech support folks I managed to get the Win32 Turbo installed on my main machine without it asking for a license key. Apparently D7’s uninstaller doesn’t clean up properly behind it. But there were still problems. I could not get the IDE to open my project file, even though a similar installation on my (smaller, less powerful) backup machine reads it without any problems. And now I have an urgent piece of development to do for a client so I have once again stripped the Turbo off my main machine and gone back to Delphi 7, which I know works.

You have no idea how depressed this makes me. I do hope it is something stupid that I did, but even so an error message would have been nice. But the IDE just briefly flashes up a blank rectangle on the screen, then it goes away as if nothing had happened.

Lots of things have been happening. I’ve had a couple of phone calls from CodeGear, from which I gather that their systems have got a little messed up and I’m not the only person getting confused, but they are at least trying to sort things out.

I also got the Fedex package, which turned out to be a CD of the Win32 Turbo. It is nice to have, but perhaps a little over the top for a product that is freely downloadable. I’ve been promised a registration key, but that hasn’t turned up yet.

I’ve also had email from CodeGear’s tech support regarding the problem installing a Turbo on a machine that used to have Delphi 7 on it. Hopefully their suggestions will work, but I have a small amount of international travel to accomplish first so I’m unlikely to have any news on that until the weekend.

What I can say at this point, however, is that I’ve had a lot more attention from CodeGear than I’ve had from any other software company I’ve had to deal with in recent years. One of these days I’ll tell you the McAfee support story.

As you can see from comments to this post, CodeGear Customer Support has noticed me. This is good. It shows that they care. And it shows that they were looking for people talking about their products online. (I suspect their finding me had something to do with my finally getting around to registering the blog with Technorati yesterday.) I’ve sent an email off to Charles. Hopefully this will all start to make sense soon.