Gotta Break It to Make It - Sat, 11 Oct 2008

I did not expect to make an easy transition from Delphi 4 to Delphi 2009. The Unicode changes in D2009 are known to cause incompatibilities and require changes. A lot has changed and it is a big jump.

None-the-less, I still held out the hope that maybe I might be able to compile Behold under D2009, work my way through the errors that are come up, and get to a working version as fast as possible. That was a wonderful hope, but as I soon found out, there is too much different.

Some of the components I have used were needed to get around functionality that was not in Delphi 4. Many of those functions have been added, but the components themselves have not been upgraded.

My big one is TRichView, and that has been made to work with the new Delphi. I just have to upgrade it to the new version and add my hundred customizations. But it will be a major task to try to speed up its core, and that will be an interesting challenge.

Then there’s Elpack that I use for the TreeView, Registry and IniFile access, recently used files, the status line and the gauges on the status line. I could upgrade that package, as it also has a compatible version. But I want to switch to Virtual Treeview, and the other things I use it for no longer do much more than Delphi does. So it will probably go.

So what I did was start with a blank canvas again. This is (thank g-d) not a total rewrite. It is an attempt to place my current functionality into a new framework. It’s a matter of just building it back up piece by piece until Behold’s whole again. I will where I can improve things along the way. It should be very interesting!

Initial impression of Delphi 2009 was not a good one: It takes about 16 seconds to start up. Ugh. Delphi 4 took less than 3 seconds. But it compiles very fast, and that’s important.