Extended Q&A to my DelphiCon session about Spring4D

Many of you have probably seen my session at DelphiCon (watch directly on Youtube) and the overall feedback has been quite positive - many thanks to you and I hope I could stir up some interest if it was completely new for you.

In this article I will address the questions that came up during the presentation but have not yet been answered. Please leave a comment if I missed any.

Q: When using Shared<T> can I determine how many shares are in play and therefore, if I'm processing the last running share?

A: Not without hacking into the data structure. Since you can pass a finalizer that automatically triggers when the last one goes out of scope that should not be necessary.

Q: Shared<T>, IShared<T> are really nice! What about performance?

A: While they involve a small heap allocation and atomic reference counting everything is as fast as it can be without any unnecessary overhead. In fact there is no object underneath implementing the interface but a handcrafted memory block which avoids overhead of object construction and destruction and adjustor thunks for the method calls. I will share some more details on this approach in a future blog post as I have been using this in several places now to achieve that extra bit of performance and reduce binary size especially for generics.

Q: Can the Shared<T> be used as a class field that you pass to other classes? Also can it be a function result that you keep until the end? I'm thinking about using this with an api wrapper like you said.

A: Absolutely!

Q: Can we / could we do unique pointer in Delphi?

A: If my understanding of a unique pointer is not wrong it prevents any assignment and makes sure that there is just one reference. If I am again not mistaken this is achieved in C++ by hiding/not giving an assignment/copy operator. This is not possible in Delphi. I was hoping that custom managed records get this functionality but unfortunately they didn't. So there is no way to prevent having an explicit or implicit assignment happening.

Q: What will it take to extend Spring4D's reach to FPC (and, in turn, Pas2js -- now that generics are supported) so we can enjoy Spring4D for type-safe Web application development?

A: I have looked into FPC several times over the years and while many people praise it for being the open source rescue from Delphi it still lacks things that many of us take for granted in Delphi such as anonymous methods - I don't know their current state but they are integral part of the majority of the library. Pas2js is a bit different and I would not consider it the regular FPC because TMS is pushing this to make TMSWebCore work which aims for Delphi compatibility. I am certainly interested in looking into it at some point but that will not be any time soon. I also don't want to get into some ifdef hell - I just have been happy about removing a lot that were for Delphi2010 and probably a few more for ARC soon.

Q: What font are you using in the editor? It is very nice to write code!

A: I was hoping for anyone to notice. ;) It is JetBrains Mono - you can get it here. Make sure to use those directly in the ttf folder of that zip file because the Delphi code editor does not support ligatures.

Q: Are any of the IEnumerable functions using threads behind the scenes to speed up processing. For example, complex where clauses on massive lists of objects.

A: No, there is no multithreading going on - the implementation is pretty much similar to the one you find in System.Linq in .NET. Due to the extensible nature of the library by using interfaces you can just make your own Version of this where you can go fancy. Unfortunately since we don't have interface helpers you have to invoke it like this: TMyEnumerable.MyWhere<TCustomer>(customers, otherstuff)

Q: Nullable is the same as C#, value based?

A: Yes, pretty much although in Delphi some types are supported that are not strictly value types but mostly treated like them such as strings. While it does not prevent you from using it with some T that is a reference type it does not make much sense and might behave wrong because it does not explicitly differ between null and explicitly having a typed nil being assigned.

Q: Could the Nullable be stringified and then parsed back?

A: I originally answered the question possibly wrong during the Q&A so here is another take at it: Yes, you can turn a nullable into a string and reverse. Here is some example code on how to achieve that. You need to have a conditional when parsing back the string though to either set the value or to set it as null. This is achieved with the helper for TValue from Spring.pas.

var
  n: Nullable<Integer>;
  s: string;
  v: TValue;
begin
  n := 42;
  s := TValue.From(n).ToString;
  Writeln(s);

  n := nil;
  s := TValue.From(n).ToString;
  Writeln(s);

  s := '55';
  v := TValue.From(s);
  v.TryToType(n);
  Writeln(n.HasValue);
  Writeln(n.Value);

  v := TValue.Empty;
  v.TryToType(n);
  Writeln(n.HasValue);
end.

Q: Is there any active development on the library or future plans? What news can we expect in Version 2?

A: There is constant development and I am always open for suggestions or improvements. Some things that I showed in the presentation are new in 2.0 but I will go into more details on features and some technical stories in the coming weeks. Right now the goal is to get an RC ready before the end of the year and before my Christmas holiday in Night City ;) The plans for the version after that is to finally work on some major refactoring of the DI container in order to fix some of its slowly revealing shortcomings in its architecture/implementation which will enable the implementation of some pretty exciting features. But more about that when the time comes.

Q: What about the future of the ORM part?

A: Due to lack of time and expertise in that area I put development of that part on hold for now. I explained this a bit more in detail some while ago on the mailing list (thanks google for deprecating the ability to pin topics...). It was a decision that was not easy but I am confident that it is better for the overall quality of the library as I can stay focused on its core features.

I know that many of you wish for better documentation and tutorials and that is top priority right after getting the 2.0 RC out.

Downloads: sample code - slides