The Delphi Language for Mobile Development Marco Cantù, Delphi Product Manager Embarcadero Technologies April 2013 Americas Headquarters EMEA Headquarters Asia-Pacific Headquarters 100 California Street, 12th Floor York House L7. 313 La Trobe Street San Francisco, California 94111 18 York Road Melbourne VIC 3000 Maidenhead, Berkshire Australia SL6 1SF, United Kingdom | White Paper The Delphi Language for Mobile Development INTRODUCTION This document is an introduction to changes in the “Mobile” version of Delphi and the new Delphi ARM compiler. The focus of this document is to highlight the language changes and techniques that can be used to port existing code and to maintain backwards compatibility. Author: Marco Cantu, Delphi Product Manager, Embarcadero Technologies (suggest updates and integrations to
[email protected]). Written with very significant technical contributions by Allen Bauer and the help of many reviewers. Document Revision: 1.0 1. A NEW COMPILER ARCHITECTURE Moving Delphi to mobile ARM platforms is part of a larger evolution for the Delphi language. As such, the R&D team here at Embarcadero adopted a new architecture that will be common among all Embarcadero languages. Rather than building the compiler and all of the related tools (often indicated with the term “toolchain”) in a completely proprietary and autonomous way, we decided to leverage an existing compiler and tool chain infrastructure that has broad industry support, making it faster for us to add new platforms and operating systems in the future as market demands change. Specifically, the new generation of Delphi compilers (and also the C++Builder compilers) utilize the LLVM architecture. What is this LLVM and why does this matter? Let’s take a quick look at LLVM, and return to our main topic later.