A Grumpy old Developer is Actually Upbeat and Excited for Once. LLM hijinks.

 When I started writing code it wasn't using delphi.  It was typing into the Commodore 64 at my local department stores in Canada, in the 1980s; Walmart hadn't made its way up here.   There were Commodore 64 displays up at Canadian Tire,  Zellers, and other places.   I would walk up to these  machines typically plugged in to a Commodore 1702 monitor and type in some variation of this program:

  10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
  20 GOTO 10

Watching the HELLO WORLDs print (slowly enough that you could see the screen fill, on an MOS 6510 CPU running at one million cycles per second,  1 Mhz, with a total memory area of 64 KB, of which 38911 bytes were available for BASIC programming) and scroll, and then trying variants of that program involving POKE 53280,x and POKE 53281,x  to set the main text area's background color, and the border color around the text area to different colors (16 total fixed colors) was enough to amaze me.

 Since then computers have become astronomically more powerful, but nothing has ever felt as earth shattering as those first times writing code, as we went from 64 KB of RAM to 128 GB of RAM being normal on a developer PC, and from 1 Mhz single core CPUs to 3+ Ghz multi-core CPUs, and from cassette tapes and floppy disk storage, through the spinning rust hard drive era, and now into the solid state storage era, it all felt incremental.

 This is not incremental.  This is new.   The attention mechanism, at the heart of the LLM revolution, commonly marketed (mis-represented) as "AI" is truly astonishing.

Hey Claude Code,  I would like you to write a bare C++ application targeting the Win32 API, that does a good job of incrementally backing up (file copying) files from one drive to another, in their original form.     Hey Cursor, there's a bug in this 400 line SQL query, find it.   Hey ChatGPT, generate for me an image that combines these three historical photographs into a reconstructed overhead view of this small village in the Netherlands.

I can hardly wait for the well-akshually people to tell me that I wasn't paying attention as the bedrock for all this was coming into everyone's awareness.     Sure sure.   But I was there through the 1980s when everything was AI, and so it is mostly a social phenomenon that we are allowed to use the words Artificial and Intelligence again, after so so many false starts.   LISP was gonna build us an AI.  So was Smalltalk. So was Prolog.  And Neural Networks.  And Bayesian Spam Filtering.   We were all over-sold and under-delivered on promises so many, many times.

There's a lot of well-deserved positive spin, and a lot of equally well-deserved negative doom and gloom around the topic of AI, LLMs and agentic coding. I'm not an idiot and I'm aware of the various camps.  In between the all-in tech bro (LET'S GOOOO!), and the doom and gloom crowd (WE'RE DOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!), which as an older guy, I often find myself automatically switching into, there's a middle version of me,  which is cautiously optimistic.

Let me make an aside here about creativity.   LLMs are regurgitators.  They aren't creative, exactly, but then, neither are people always creative, exactly.   I find I don't like SUNO.AI and the creepy songs it generates, because I don't like that it emulates something that I wish we had enough good taste to not emulate.   Sure, I also wish humans had enough good taste not to emulate bro country songs, but here we are.   So perhaps, if humans are going to generate slop, it's FINE if the LLMs also get to do it.  Maybe I'll get what I think we all need which is for everyone to get tired of all of this, and to stop listening to mainstream "genres" which are in effect, a corporate management system around art.  The music industry, so to speak. Nashville, so to speak.  I'm cool with that disruption. The music business was already ruined, mostly by human beings, long before LLMs, so I'm not going to act upset about the already destroyed landscape having some further burns and scars added.  Moving from audible art to visual art now; I don't think that an LLM's ability to generate imagery threatens human artists much; already we're sick of CGI in movies and we prefer practical effects. I believe that hand drawn art will be something always imitated, and seldom duplicated.   If anything, LLM generated imagery will probably result in a cultural return to the land.    Get off your phone and your ipad, and go to a physical gallery and look at art, if you want to see something that isn't just pixels on a screen.  I think it's beyond hilarious that people defend and define differences between "something Gemini generated" and "something I made in photoshop".  Both are equally fake, equally digital, equally built with a tool.   If you want something made without digital tools, make something without digital tools. You still can.

 

Software developers, our jobs are changing.  Have already changed.  Try to keep up.

 

P.S. Kai from Embarcadero is absolute garbage. Don't waste your time with it.   Spend time with Cursor, Claude Code, PI coding harness, and Cline.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grumpy Old Developer Yells At Clouds Part 2

There's an old Yiddish joke that most of us are familiar with:

 A man came to a tailor, and asked to buy a new suit. The tailor brought it to him, As he stood before the mirror, he noticed the vest was a little uneven at the bottom.   “Oh,” said the tailor, “don’t worry about that Just hold the shorter end down with your left hand and no one will ever notice.”

  While the customer proceeded to do this, he noticed that the lapel of the jacket curled up instead of lying flat. “Oh that?” said the tailor. “That’s nothing. Just turn your head a little and hold it down with your chin.”  The customer complied, and as he did, he noticed that the inseam of the pants was a little short and he felt that the rise was a bit too tight. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” said the tailor. “Just pull the inseam down with your right hand, and everything will be perfect” The customer agreed and purchased the suit.

The next day he wore his new suit with all the accompanying hand and chin “alterations.” As he limped through the park with his chin holding down his lapel, one hand tugging at the vest, the other hand grasping his crotch, two old men stopped playing checkers to watch him stagger by.   “Oh, I say!” said the first man. “Look at that poor crippled man!”   The second man reflected for a moment, then murmured, “Oh, yes, it looks like he is in a lot of pain, but I wonder, where did he get that wonderful suit?"

This is a situation we are all familiar with in various areas of life.  A new car, which we hope would be an upgrade from our previous beater. Or our long-serving decades old IDE, Delphi, and its language, compiler, debugger, and tools.

 Trying to demonstrate Delphi 12 in 2025 to a new user on a high-DPI system with the current woes of the form designer and its basically broken modes for high DPI design is absolutely  such a case. We must wave our hands and say "don't worry this will get better in the next version, or the next".  Next year in Jerusalem, as they say.   But don't count on it.

 Trying to install Delphi with its various unstable patches and re-releases and inline attempts to fix things which ship broken feels similarly bad.   Trying to use the compiler when it has decided that it's time for you to spend a day chasing random failures and AVRs in the compiler.  Trying to connect the IDE to a modern version of MariaDB/MySQL. Trying to fix problems with deployment of Android binaries, or to figure out what is wrong when a BPL won't load, or is destabilizing your IDE,  these are all feelings which take away from the ability to do the job the tool was meant to do, and like the suit, can result in one feeling rather immobilized, and unable to do much of anything at all.  Trying to use GetIt on days when GetIt has decided it doesn't want to "Get It".   Every time we turn on Error Insight and think, this time will be different, and it isn't.  The code completion engine sucking up 80 percent of your CPU or all your memory again, the newly rebuilt one that was built to fix the CPU and memory bloat of the previous one, but which is more bloated and slow than the thing it replaced.  The dark theme still not drawing itself properly and making basic features of the IDE not work like the Edit and Find/Replace features, or the Project Options dialog causing an Access Violation every second time you open it.   The other users of this product who are absolutely convinced that I must be "holding it wrong".   Because they don't see any of these problems, these problems do not exist.  Maybe that, the inability to notice the bit rot, as it accumulates, is the thing that dismays me most.

 It's really a sad fate for what was once a notably powerful and useful product.

 

 

Delphi mobile development gripes

 This post is going to be a bit of a rant, but hopefully a useful one.     Mobile development would benefit greatly from a stable, simple, future proof multi-platform IDE and framework and tools of some kind.

It's a great shame that this sort of thing doesn't exist.   You see, there's an essential complexity element, and an accidental complexity element in mobile development, and here's the problem

1. The two big mobile platforms are endlessly mutating, each away from its own previous iterations. iOS moves faster and breaks more often, and Apple adds onerous new hoops to jump through more frequently than Google, but both, mostly driven by security and a desire to improve the overall quality of their app ecosystems, add more and more burdens, as years roll on.

2. The two platforms each require tools which change frequently.   Google's worse in this regards, as the various levels of Android SDKs and tools, and their quirks, will attest.

Delphi, and FMX (Firemonkey) are noble attempts, but they are not winning significant traction in the market with the product, and it's not hard to say why.   It's been an incredibly hard uphill battle to fight with Apple, and Google, and then build a native code compilation system (Delphi loves to be native to an instruction set for a single CPU) that will never be really at home in the Android dalvik-vm centric world.  Native compilation to ARM is a better fit for iOS but the native Cocoa APIs are not easily interfaced to Delphi apps, and forever there is a need for a series of complex wrappers to make iOS development with Delphi and FMX feasible.

I spent most of the last two days trying to figure out a quirk that only occurs on Delphi 12.1,  and does not occur on Delphi 12.2, which I can't safely fix by moving an entire product to Delphi 12.2, because of potential regressions in Delphi 12.2, and which is completely inscrutable.  The problem is not yet solved, and as I write this I'm reinstalling a delphi version on a different PC for the third time.

The latest small frustration? The delphi 12.0, 12.1 and 12.2 installers have a habit of not installing the android-tools even when the installer is told to install the SDK or the android platform.   On systems where ADB.exe was installed by the installer, the path is in CatalogRepository. Once it stops doing that installation, nothing will make the install work again, that I know of. Other developers I work with don't hit this glitch, but I hit it on four different PCs. The android platforms folder is also not installing, as if some marker exists somewhere in the registry that means "don't bother installing parts the installer needs to install for android to work".

figure: SDK Manager showing the supposed adb.exe location

Here's what the dialog should look like without any errors

The problem to me with this design is there should be a button here that says "reinstall missing items", since these items ship with Delphi.

The delphi app in question, that I need Delphi 12.1 on my pc to debug, is failing to start and the android parent launcher process is attempting to relaunch it.  The only information visible is found by using Android Studio's ADB LOGCAT support, filtered to the bundle id of the mobile app to get the following repeating errors that libc is raising at startup, with a permission read in a bundle resource.   Googling and stack overflow searches come up blank.   Installing Delphi 12.2 on my pc then 12.1 then 12.2 is crazy making, and is the reason I'm ranting a bit today. 

And this in the end is the problem with not going with Android Studio, being all alone on your own tiny little sub-platform of the Android platform, and that in the end, is why I do not believe that Delphi FMX has a long term future, on any platform.   The fragmentation, the technical risk, the quirks, the bugs, there are no solutions for tiny niche commercial systems.    The market will kill it.

Anyways here's a checklist for "Delphi just won't show me my device in the Android Targets".

1. find any adb.exe running that is not the adb shown in the dialog above and terminate it.  Android Studio will have its own version, each version of delphi on your computer will be using its own, and there's no mechanism in delphi to manage these adb.exe processes.

2. make sure using SDK manager that your project is looking for ADB.exe where there actually is an adb.exe and that the platform folders and other folders in the SDK and NDK tabs exist.

3.  Refresh.

4. Reboot.

5. Look for on-device messages to allow you to do USB debugging. Answer yes when prompted.

6. Make sure USB debugging is enabled on your device, or adb.exe won't find your machine.

There are about 50 more tips to make this really work, but it's so frustrating, and that's without all the bugs building, signing, deploying and getting apk and aab files into app stores.

If anyone has seen this error with delphi 12, the app crashes at startup, the debugger in 12.1 won't attach, and the logcat shows this

Access denied finding property "ro.vendor.pref_scale_resolution"

There are also messages from libMEOW that appear to just be noise:

2024-11-22 15:48:59.786 10985-10985 Compatibil...geReporter com.***           D  Compat change id reported: 149924527; UID 10217; state: ENABLED

2024-11-22 15:48:59.786 10985-10985 Compatibil...geReporter com.***           D  Compat change id reported: 132649864; UID 10217; state: DISABLED

2024-11-22 15:49:02.876 11358-11358 NetworkSecurityConfig   com.***           D  No Network Security Config specified, using platform default

2024-11-22 15:49:02.877 11358-11358 NetworkSecurityConfig   com.***           D  No Network Security Config specified, using platform default

2024-11-22 15:49:02.878 11358-11358 libc                    com.***           E  Access denied finding property "ro.vendor.pref_scale_resolution"

2024-11-22 15:49:02.888 11358-11388 libMEOW                 com.***           D  meow reload base cfg path: na

2024-11-22 15:49:02.888 11358-11388 libMEOW                 com.***           D  meow reload overlay cfg path: na

2024-11-22 15:49:02.889 11358-11388 libMEOW                 com.***           D  applied 1 plugins for [com.***]:

2024-11-22 15:49:02.889 11358-11388 libMEOW                 com.***           D    plugin 1: [libMEOW_gift.so]:

2024-11-22 15:49:02.923 11358-11358 Compatibil...geReporter com.***           D  Compat change id reported: 149924527; UID 10217; state: ENABLED

2024-11-22 15:49:02.924 11358-11358 Compatibil...geReporter com.***           D  Compat change id reported: 132649864; UID 10217; state: DISABLED

2024-11-22 15:49:08.017 11602-11602 NetworkSecurityConfig   com.***           D  No Network Security Config specified, using platform default

2024-11-22 15:49:08.018 11602-11602 NetworkSecurityConfig   com.***           D  No Network Security Config specified, using platform default

2024-11-22 15:49:08.019 11602-11602 libc                    com.***           E  Access denied finding property "ro.vendor.pref_scale_resolution"

2024-11-22 15:49:08.029 11602-11629 libMEOW                 com.***           D  meow reload base cfg path: na

2024-11-22 15:49:08.029 11602-11629 libMEOW                 com.***           D  meow reload overlay cfg path: na

2024-11-22 15:49:08.031 11602-11629 libMEOW                 com.***           D  applied 1 plugins for [com.***]:

2024-11-22 15:49:08.031 11602-11629 libMEOW                 com.***           D    plugin 1: [libMEOW_gift.so]:

2024-11-22 15:49:08.065 11602-11602 Compatibil...geReporter com.***           D  Compat change id reported: 149924527; UID 10217; state: ENABLED

Dear Santa: My 2023 Delphi Christmas Wishlist

 Dear Santa,

I have been a very good Delphi Developer this year, and I would like the following Delphi related items in my Festive Non Denominational Holiday Hoisery. 

1.  I would like Delphi to be able to work on my high DPI two monitor system without driving me crazy.  That means having the Property Inspector draw its editor items where they belong instead of in some place that makes it impossible to use the property inspector, to alter components on forms.

2.  I would like Delphi's IDE layout management system to be able to organize only the contents of the IDE window, not the top/left position of the IDE, nor which window it's visible on, because having the IDE jump around randomly among several profiles (startup, another one after projects are open, a third one after a project is running) drives me nuts.  

3. I would like the IDE to be as stable as Delphi 7 was on large codebases.  It's been decades and every few years, claims are made that this year's delphi is stable, finally.   We were told that about every XE* release, Delphi 10, Delphi 10.4, Delphi 11, and now, Delphi 12.  Still, working on large codebases means crashes, hangs and freezes.

Thank you very much Santa Claus,

Yours sincerely

Delphi Code Monkey

In Search of: The Ultimate Git GUI Client

You might thing that because of a post where I rant about Git's glitchiness that I hate git. I'm actually a pretty happy Git user, except when Git is having one of its moods.

 I have been a long time TortoiseGIT user, and before that, I was a tortoise HG user, and before that, a TortoiseSVN user.    In brief, the Tortoise family of version control GUIs main design philosophy is that Tortoise hooks itself deeply into the Windows Explorer.   This has been both a source of its power, and a source of pain, since this original decision.   The caching mechanisms it uses are part of the speed, and also part of the pain and bugs.   Having Tortoise on your system means that Windows explorer (and your computer) is almost always doing work in the background to index your entire hard drive  to find which folders are Git repositories and what the status of every working file in every folder is.

The good part is that once you accept the overall system issues, and perhaps slowness of your entire computer, and that you will periodically have to manage issues like the tortoise Cache needing a reset,  you get always on "friction free" awareness that a file has been modified, just by looking at the icon decorations in windows explorer.   This really is great.  Except when it's not.

Recently, Windows 11 (my main developer workstation) started locking up when I log into my desktop, and I had to create a new user account and log into it in order to get to my desktop, which was hard to do, since Windows profile corruption was also preventing me getting to the windows desktop.   I was eventually able to get a Task Manager up and to run a command prompt and launch other things, even though the Windows Explorer itself was refusing to initialize, open the start menu and taskbar, etc.    The best I was able to do was figure out that this problem went away when I uninstalled Tortoise.  I can't prove that Microsoft changed anything but I can say that I doubt a lot of the Explorer Shell team at MIcrosoft are checking for regressions for all the thousands of shell explorer extension API products out there that hook into Windows explorer.  

While I think the folks who make Tortoise are wonderful, I can on longer trust that Microsoft will avoid touching things that have "always worked" and in Windows 11, breaking things wholesale, seems acceptable.   Hiding most of the right click context menu content under a second level of right click menus, fine.  If it makes some top level program manager at Microsoft happy; Hey look we simplified your Windows Experiences and made all those shell extensions (like 7Zip's one, and Tortoise, and others) just GO AWAY.

Right now the number one candidate to replace Tortoise Git as a GUI is Git Tower or Git Kraken.  I'd be happy to hear comments from other people with suggestions.

Windows 11, and Delphi 11 : How is it for everybody? You better move to Delphi 11 if you're going to update to Windows 11, and here's why...

 So the future is here, Windows 11, and Delphi 11. Do you think the "everybody moved to 10 everything" and "everybody moved to 11 everything" all the same time is a coincidence?

Here's how it actually works:

1.  Something in the industry creates a buzz. What is it this week? Bitcoin? NFT? NFC? GUIDs?  N-Tier Design? Message Queueing?  The Internet of Things?

2. Everybody rushes to be "part of that". 

If you get hired at Embarcadero, or anywhere really, to sell anything, especially in the tech sector you'll get hauled into your bosses office regularly and someone who looks like they might belong in a Dilbert cartoon will tell you what the new thing is, that they read in their BossManagerMonthly magazine or blog, and tell you you need to get on top of it.

What is Windows 11?  For microsoft it's a chance to make a set of controlled breaking changes to the Windows platform ecosystem. It's neither purely a "good" thing, nor purely a "bad/mediocre" thing. It's a necessary thing. 

While Apple feels free to break everything all the time, every day, Microsoft has comitted to, and maintained a history of not breaking everything every day.   And so there comes a time, when breaking changes and "flag days" have to happen.     In true microsoft fashion, there are devices that will continue to run Windows 10, for the next few years, or longer.     And also in true microsoft fashion, there are devices that will refuse to auto-upgrade for you but which you can force to update to Windows 11, via the media creation tool, with Microsoft's full blessing.  You try it, you get the results and you get to see for yourself what Windows 11 does on your random pre-2020 consumer hardware.

So what is this post about? It's just a request for discussion.  What has been your experience? Are you running Windows 11 and Delphi 11 and how is it?

I have one anecdote to report; It seems Delphi 10.4 debugger hangs a lot on Windows 11.  Any attempt to set breakpoints and single step, the whole IDE (bds.exe) process hangs forever at 0% CPU. There do not appear to be wait chain analysis tools built into Windows 11 yet, and I'm not sure if I could do a wait chain analysis on BDS.exe from visual studio but I don't have visual studio on this box.   

The issue is  reproducible with a trivial helloworld-from-delphi app in 10.4, but is more frequently reproducible on the large 150+ megabyte exe apps I get paid to code, some of which load large non-trivial amounts of redistributables with, including openssl,  chromium embedded (google chrome browser), and a lot of other stuff.  These large apps are not fully portable to Delphi 11 without a large investment of time, and so I can't say if the same app will hang the debugger kernel in our large Delphi 11 apps.  The main app being debug above is a 32 bit 169 megabyte exe that loads another 180 megs of 32 bit DLLs (Chromium "libcef" is over 100 megs of stuff).   

In a trivial hello world app, Delphi 10.4.2 freezes about 50% of  the time after I hit a breakpoint and then continue.  Other 50% of time, it may recover and then when you end the debug session it will say "fatal debugger error" and ask that you shut down the IDE. THere's basically something fundamentally different in the Windows Kernel environment in Windows 11, and the Delphi 10.4 debugger is not up to speed with the changes in the platform.    My tests are with Delphi 10.4 build 27.0.40680.4203 (delphi 10.4.2, all of Update2 installed) on Windows 11 pro build 21H2, osbuild 22000.258 (windows 11 initial release).

Did you know that the Raize Components (Rz*) by Ray Konopka are now in Getit under a completely inscrutable new moniker?

 Would you have guessed what "Bonus KSVC 7" is, if you saw it in getit.  No? Neither would I.

It turns out that if you are looking for Raize Components they're now called Bonus KSVC, and available as version 6.5 and 7 in GetIt.

Raize Components, as it was for over a decade, got renamed to Konopka Signature Controls in 2020. But one rename was not enough for the bright sparks at EmbarcIdera.  Now it's been renamed again, this time it's called KSVC. Sure.   And the word bonus was necessary to put in front in the title, because "raisins".

Naming things is one of the hard problems in Computer Science, I guess. 

The components remain quite awesome,  and since they're in GetIt, I can heartily recommend everyone check them out if you hadn't heard about them.  There's still a discussion forum dedicated to them on the Raize.com site, but the product appears to have been 100% bought out by Embarcadero and is basically "part of Delphi now", which was a good move by Embarcadero.