Back in December 2016, I posted some ideas for some Delphi language enhancements. That post turned out to be somewhat controversial, I received some rather hostile emails about how I was trying to turn Delphi into C#. That certainly wasn't my intent, but rather to modernize Delphi, in a way that helps me write less, but more maintainable code. Nearly 2 years later, Delphi 10.3 Rio actually implements some of those features.
I'm not going to claim credit for the new language features, and the syntax suggestions I made were pretty obvious ones, but I like to think I perhaps spurred them on a bit ;) My blog post had over 12K views, so there was certainly plenty of interest in new language features, and from what I have seen out there on the interwebs they have for the most part been well received.
So lets take a look at which suggestions made the cut for 10.3 - referencing my original post.
| Feature | Implemented | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Local Variable Initialisation | No | |
| Type Inference | Yes! | For inline variables only, Confuses code insight! |
| Inline variable declaration, with type inference and block scope | Yes, Yes and Yes! | Confuses code insight! |
| Loop variable inline declaration | Yes! | Confuses code insight! |
| Shortcut property declaration | No | |
| Interface Helpers | No | |
| Strings (and other non ordinals) in Case Statements | No | |
| Ternary Operator | No | |
| Try/Except/Finally | No | |
| Named Arguments | No | |
| Variable method arguments | No | |
| Lambdas | No | |
| Linq | No | Depends on lambdas and interface helpers. |
| Async/Await | No | |
| Non reference counted interfaces | No | |
| Attribute Constraints | No | |
| Operator overloading on classes. | No | |
| Improve Generic Constraint | No | |
| Fix IEnumerable |
No | |
| Yield return - Iterator blocks | No | |
| Partial classes | No | |
| Allow Multiple Uses clauses | No | |
| Allow non parameterized interfaces to have parameterized methods | No |
So, 3 out of 23. To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised when I found out about them, given the pace of language change in the past. I'm hopeful this is just the start of things to come and we get to see Delphi evolve and catch up with other modern programming languages. I have a bunch of other language features I'd like to see, and received lots of suggestions from other users.
We're still using Delphi XE7 for FinalBuilder 8, and I rarely change compiler versions during the life of a major product version. So I'll only get to use the new language features when I get fully stuck into FinalBuilder 9 & Automise 6. I'm in the process of getting Delphi 10.3 compatible versions of all the third party libraries (commercial and open source) - as and long time delphi user will know, that's always more difficult than it should be!