Spinettaro's Blog: May 2020

Hi folks,

Delphi 10.4 Sydney has just released and this version comes with a lot of interesting features:

New Delphi CodeInsight based on LSP server
Custom Managed Records in the Delphi Language
New VCL Components, including TEdgeBrowser, and expanded High DPI support for VCL styled applications
Enhanced Delphi multi-device platform support integrating newer Apple APIs and supporting the latest Android
New LLDB-based debugger for Windows 64-bit for C++
Unified installer for online & offline installations
GetIt Package Manager Enhancements

I would like to spend few words around the features that impressed me:

Code Insight Technology in Delphi 10.4

From David Millington blog post:

In 10.4, Code insight features are implemented using a ‘LSP Server’. LSP refers to the Language Server Protocol, which is a standardized way to implement code insight-like features for many languages. An IDE talks to a ‘language server’, which is a small helper app that calculates and generates the information the IDE displays. It does so using a defined protocol, and that’s the language server protocol.

In other words, the IDE now talks to a helper app when you do something like open a project, or type a keystroke in your file.

What does it means?

Communication with another process is asynchronous
The work is done in another process

This means all the memory usage for calculating results is no longer in the IDE itself. The IDE has more memory, and the helper app can use its entire memory space dedicated solely to providing results

What you see onscreen is what the compiler sees.

If your code compiles, you won’t see any Error Insight errors; conversely, if you do see red squiggly underlines in your code or in the Structure view, your code will not compile.

You can get code completion while debugging.

If you want to know more about it have a look to David Millington post

Custom Managed Records

This is absolutely the top new language feature of Delphi 10.4!

Now in 10.4 the Delphi record type supports custom initialization and finalization:

From Marco Cantù blog post:

You can declare a record with custom initialization and finalization code regardless of the data type of its fields, and you can write such custom initialization and finalization code.
This is achieved by adding specific, new operators to the record type (you can have one without the other if you want).
Below is a simple code snippet:

type
  TMyRecord = record
    Value: Integer;
    class operator Initialize (out Dest: TMyRecord);
    class operator Finalize(var Dest: TMyRecord);
  end;

The huge difference between this construction mechanism and what was previously available for records is the automatic invocation. If you write something like the code below, you can invoke both the initializer and the finalizer, and end up with a try-finally block generated by the compiler for your managed record instance.

Marco Cantù post to know more.

GetIt Package Manager Enhancements

GetIt Package Manager Enhancements in Delphi 10.4:

the ability of sorting the list of entries by date, seeing the most recent ones on top
for each entry you have already installed, the indication that an updated version is available
the ability to list all installed entries that have an update available

Rad studio patches

A killer feature of the new GeIt is absolutely the ability to use GetIt to distribute patches, with a specific way to alert customers that a patch is available. There is a new section to the Welcome page to indicate when a patch is available and you have not installed it: