RAD Studio 10.3 Rio in Slovenia

On December, 6^th I’ll be showing all that is new and shiny in 10.3 Rio to anyone that happens to pass by!

Join me in Ljubljana at 9:30 in the “standard” venue … just don’t forget to register first.

OmniThreadLibrary 3.07.6

Hear, hear, new OmniThreadLibrary is here!
Version 3.07.6 brings official support for Delphi 10.3 Rio, few changes and bugfixes.
You can get it now on git, download the ZIP archive, install it with Delphinus or with GetIt.
For more information, visit OmniThreadLibrary home page or write your question on the forum.

For..to..step in Delphi!

Today I was porting some legacy code and noticed a weird warning:

Weird warning, I thought. Obviously the loop variable can be passed as a var parameter as the code compiles. Why a warning and not an error, then?

Using configuration records and operators to reduce number of overloaded methods

When writing libraries you sometimes want to provide users (that is, programmers) with a flexible API. If a specific part of your library can be used in different ways, you may want to provide multiple overloaded methods accepting different combinations of parameters.

For example, IOmniPipeline interface from OmniThreadLibrary implements three overloaded Stage functions.

function  Stage(pipelineStage: TPipelineSimpleStageDelegate; 
  taskConfig: IOmniTaskConfig = nil): IOmniPipeline; overload;

function  Stage(pipelineStage: TPipelineStageDelegate; 
  taskConfig: IOmniTaskConfig = nil): IOmniPipeline; overload;

function  Stage(pipelineStage: TPipelineStageDelegateEx; 
  taskConfig: IOmniTaskConfig = nil): IOmniPipeline; overload;

Delphi’s own System.Threading is even worse. In class TParallel, for example, there are 32 overloads of the &For class function. Thirty two! Not only it is hard to select appropriate function; it is also hard to decode something useful from the code completion tip. Check the image below – can you tell which overloaded version I’m trying to call? Me neither!

Because of all that, it is usually good to minimize number of overloaded methods. We can do some work by adding default parameters, but sometimes this doesn’t help. Today I’d like to present an alternative solution – configuration records and operator overloading. To simplify things, I’ll present a mostly made-up problem. You can download it from github.