Delphi Programming Tips & Tricks

The Delphi 12.3 update has just been released. The most exciting part of this release is the long-awaited 64-bit IDE. Now, this is only an Initial Release of the IDE, and it is not yet a full replacement for the 32-bit IDE and its functionality. The main advantage of the 64-bit IDE is that the available memory is no longer constrained by the 32-bit address space, and the upper limit is now the available system memory. The more you have, the more you can use. This is a great news for all developers with large projects, where the 32-bit IDE would easily hit the memory wall. To start with, the 64-bit IDE only supports the 64-bit Windows platform. The primary purpose of such a release with only partial functionality is to allow all component developers to update their design-time packages, and prepare them to support the 64-bit IDE. And to do that, you only need the 64-bit Windows platform anyway. For all other platforms, there is no immediate advantage of using a 64-bit IDE. As we all...

On the 13th March, last year I was elected as a Stack Overflow moderator. I am using this opportunity to thank everyone who who voted for me back then. It has been an interesting year. The "Chinese curse" kind of interesting, but I can't talk about that too much. The world is flooded with AI slop, and everyone and their dog is using it. And Stack Overflow users are no exception. Low-reputation users, high-reputation users, the magical song of AI is too hard to resist. Literal thousands and thousands of users have posted AI answers, thinking they will get away with it. Thousands and thousands have failed. When someone asks me why am I so skeptical about AI? The answer is really simple: I have seen it all. I know what it can and what it cannot do. And while it is certainly a useful tool when used carefully and for specific purposes, most of the time it is a huge time waster. Responsible use of AI is a rare occurrence on the site. I think I can count the number of case...