Introducing MultiBuilder

When I'm working on OmniThreadLibrary, I have to keep backwards compatibility in mind. And man, is that hard! OmniThreadLibrary supports every Delphi from 2007 onward and that means lots of IFDEFs and some ugly hacks.

Typically I develop new stuff on Berlin or Tokyo and then occasionally start a batch script that tests if everything compiles and runs unit tests for all supported platforms in parallel. (I wrote about that system two years ago in article Setting Up a Parallel Build System.) Dealing with 14 DOS windows, each showing compilation log, is cumbersome, though, and that's why I do this step entirely too infrequently.

For quite some time I wanted to write a simple framework that would put my homebrew build batch into a more formal framework and which would display compilation results in a nicer way. Well, this weekend I had some time and I sat down and put together just that - a MultiBuilder. I can promise that it will be extensively used in development of OmniThreadLibrary v4. (Which, incidentally, will drop support for 2007 to XE. You've been notified.)

The rest of this post represents a short documentation for the project, taken from its GitHub page.

I don't plan to spend much time on this project. If you find it useful and if you would like to make it better, go ahead! Make the changes, create a pull request. I'll be very happy to consider all improvements.

See you in Piacenza!

It is now official - I'll be participating both as a seminar and as a conference speaker on Delphi Day 2018 in Piacenza. This is a new experience for me - I had quite some presentations in Italy so far and I know that Italians are both great participants and excellent hosts, but I was never part of Delphi Day.

On June, 6th I'll lead a seminar titled Writing High Performance Delphi Applications. It will be based on material from my Delphi High Performance book. We will look into variety of topics - algorithmic complexity, performance considerations when using built-in Delphi types, memory manager internals and optimisations and parallel programming. This will also be a good chance to grab a signed copy of the "high performance" and Parallel Programming with OmniThreadLibrary books (wink, wink ;) ).

Next day I'll participate on the conference programme with a talk called Defensive programming for a better future. Without even starting Delphi (look ma, no hands!) I'll look into different areas of programming where some common sense and simple guidelines can represent a difference between well- functioning code and a nest of bugs.

See you!