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 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. The LLVM project has its main web site with a detailed description at http://llvm.org In short, LLVM is “a collection of modular and reusable compiler and tool-chain technologies”. Despite the name (which was originally an acronym, but it is now considered as “the full name of the project”), LLVM has little to do with virtual machines.