procedure TForm125.Button1Click(Sender: TObject); var button: TButton; begin button := Sender as TButton; button.Caption := 'Working ...'; button.Enabled := false; Sleep(5000); button.Enabled := true; button.Caption := 'Done!'; end;
Now, your boss says, you have to make it parallel so the user can start three copies of it. (You also have to add two new buttons to the form to start those instances but that’s easy to do.)
Alex did the impossible and translated all existing parts of Parallel Programming with OmniThreadLibrary in a record time! The Russian version of the book is now on sale at LeanPub.
Today I have published a new chapter in A Smart Book – Programming with Smart. Inside you’ll find:
Fellow programmer Егоров Александр (Alex Egorov) has offered to translate the OmniThreadLibrary book into Russian.
As the original book, it will be published on the LeanPub. Current plan is to make it available after the High-level multithreading chapter is translated. At the moment, you can download the first draft which contains translated Introduction.
You can express your interest in the book here.
The Introduction to OmniThreadLibrary chapter is completed. New version of the book has already been published and all buyers have been notified by the email.
Wiki will be updated soon.
Please remember – the best way to support the OmniThreadLibrary project is to buy the book!
The next chapter will be either Synchronisation or How-to. I’ll give you few more days of voting time to decide the matter.
There’s a new poll available – look to the right and you’ll see it.
If you have any preferences on what you want to read in the Parallel Programming with OmniThreadLibrary next, please vote.
Chapter five of my book Parallel Programming with OmniThreadLibrary is now completed. New version of the book has already been published and all buyers have been notified by the email.
Wiki will be updated soon.
Please remember – the best way to support the OmniThreadLibrary project is to buy the book!
The next chapter on the list is Introduction to OmniThreadLibrary which won the public poll by a very small margin (34 votes against the 31 votes for the Synchronisation chapter).
Today I have published new version of the A Smart Book.
Newly added chapter Smart Control on 54 pages covers all built-in controls, from TW3Panel to TW3Header. Additional sections include tips on writing custom controls and description of the TW3ScrollControl control.
Sample book was also extended. In addition to Smart Pascal and Regular Expressions chapters it now contains selected parts from the Smart Controls chapter, including full text on TW3EditBox and TW3Toolbar.
A chapter on blocking collection (IOmniBlockingCollection) is now available online.
Pop quiz! What’s wrong with this code?
FPipeline1 := Parallel.Pipeline
.Stage(
procedure (const input: TOmniValue; var output: TOmniValue)
begin
end)
.Stage(
procedure (const input: TOmniValue; var output: TOmniValue)
begin
end)
.OnStop(
procedure
begin
Caption := 'All done';
FPipeline1 := nil;
end)
.Run;
FPipeline1.Input.CompleteAdding;
While setting up the poll on the right I did something wrong and it was prematurely closed.
This has now been corrected – you can again vote for your favourite.
Last week I started solving weird ‘out of memory’ crash in one of our services. First reports of problems came in from a client but with some experimenting I managed to repeat it on the test configuration. The program works nicely for few hours and then something weird happens and it starts using the memory, few megs per minute, until it crashes.
Repeating the problem on the test configuration usually means half the victory won but this time it wasn’t so :( I was fighting the most terrible of memory leaks – a live leak. Memory was allocated, stored away in some management structure and properly disposed off when the program terminated. FastMM have shown no problems at all. Such problems are always hard to find.
Chris Rolliston has published his monumental[*] work “Delphi XE2 Foundations” in Kindle format (paper version to follow). The book is split in three parts (TOC is provided in the book home page), each priced at £7.99/€8.99/US$9.99 (which of course translates to $13.79 for people not living in USA, UK, DE, FR, ES or IT – damn Amazon!). As the book is excellent, the price is more than fair – if you doubt my words, download the sample from the Amazon.
As the book site is called “delphifoundations.com” and not “delphixe2foundations.com” I can’t but assume that Chris will update the book to following Delphi releases, which would indeed be a great thing.
Recommended!
[*] It is hard to tell book size from the Amazon’s download size but I have read Chapter 15 (Multithreading) in advance and I can attest to the fact that it is a) very long and detailed, b) very exhaustive and c) very well written.
I have finally pushed the Publish button and “The Book” is now available on LeanPub.
To get the current book status, click here or on the book cover image right to this post.
If you want to affect the order in which the book is written, participate in poll on the right (below the book cover image). I will complete the “High-level Multithreading” chapter regardless of your votes but then I’ll follow the majority.
Do you know that feeling when you can’t put together a simple piece of code? You turn it around and around and there’s always “one last” problem. Even after you’ll happy with it, the first user that tries it out will find a problem. And then you correct that and you’ll happy with it again and the first user that tries it now will find a new problem. :(
It looks like I’m playing this game with Parallel.Join. I can’t make the @#$%^ thing to work correctly. That’s why I have just issued another hotfix. If you are following the SVN head, just do the Update. Otherwise, please download the updated OtlParallel unit.
Thanks go to [meishier] for reporting the problem!
I have decided to start up a new blog, dedicated to programming with Smart – www.smartprogrammer.org. If you are using the Smart Mobile Studio or if you think that programming mobile applications with Pascal is an interesting idea, make sure to bookmark it.
I will however not move all my Smart-related posts there, most important stuff will also be published here.
My book about the Smart is now available – read more in my post on the new blog. [But feel free to comment here, if you want.]
And the last but not least – I have created a Twitter account. (Took me a long time, I know.). Follow me @thedelphigeek and you’ll get notifications about the OmniThreadLibrary, A Smart Book and more.
There was a nasty bug in Parallel.Join which (sometimes) raised its ugly head when number of tasks submitted to the Join abstraction was larger than the number of parallel execution units (threads). Big thanks go to [Passella] for reporting the problem together with a reproducible test case.
If you are following the SVN head, just do the Update. Otherwise, please download the updated OtlParallel unit.
