I recently blogged about Revisiting TThreadedQueue and TMonitor in Delphi and it spawned some discussions including a thread on the English-language Delphi-PRAXiS forums where a few users participated in the discussion led by Kiriakos Vlahos (online user name of pyscripter) who provided the suggested corrections to the underlying code. Anders Melander proposed changes, and others such as David Heffernan and Uwe Raabe contributed to the discussion as well. Dmitry Arefiev announced today that the corrections will be in the next version (RAD Studio 10.4 Sydney Update 1) with some modifications due to a new cross-platform AtomicCmpExchange128 method!
Kiriakos’ response to that announcement deserves repeating here:
This is worth a certain degree of celebration. I cannot remember Embarcadero/Inprise/Borland etc. being so responsive ever. It also demonstrates the power of the collective efforts of the community to make Delphi better.
I have been a long-time fan of Delphi and I’m very glad to see this sort of response from everyone involved.
If you want to test out the proposed changes, there is a MonitorWaitStackFix unit in the related stress test project folder. With this unit included, the stress test successfully completed two 24-hour test runs using Win32 and Win64 builds with Delphi 10.4 Sydney. (Configured with: 1,000 worker threads; 20ms PopTimeOut; 86,400 max runtime seconds. Executed on: Windows 10 build 18363, Intel 7-7700K 4.2GHz, 4 cores, 8 logical processors, 64GB RAM)
If you want to check out more code from Kiriakos, check out his GitHub repositories which include the popular pyscripter Python IDE with 490 stars and the python4delphi components with 327 stars. Both are likely in the top 20 Delphi-related repositories on GitHub today.
I’ve nominated Kiriakos to be an Embarcadero MVP as I think he deserves the added recognition. You could do the same, follow him on GitHub, star his repositories, and stop by the forum to say thank you for his efforts on this long-standing Delphi issue!
With the power of 10.4 Sydney and a community like this, it is a fun time to be a Delphi Developer! We will never see the heydays of 90+% market domination of a single vendor solution like Microsoft Windows again, but we certainly have a capable cross-platform tool that can attack the vast majority of devices out there on a number of different supported platforms. Core improvements like this at the cross platform run time library level help all Delphi developers provide the best solutions possible.