Saturday, May 05, 2007

Delphi 2007 and Binary Compatibility

A really cool feature of Delphi 2007 is it is binary compatible with Delphi 2006 (on the Win32 side). What this means is that unlike every previous Delphi and Turbo Pascal release (as far as I know) you can keep all your compiled DCU files. That means you don't have to wait / hope / pray for your 3rd party component provider to release an updated release for Delphi 2007, most of your Delphi 2006 components for Win32 will work just fine.

Typically what makes a DCU stay compatible is if the interface section of the unit remains unchanged. The really cool thing about Delphi 2007 is they added a new property to TForm for support of Vista Aero, but they still remained backwards compatible.

Allen Bauer broke the news about how this was pulled off. Steve Trefethen has some more behind the scenes details. And as usual, Hallvard Vassbotn has a great technical write-up on all the details.

One really cool think, is I think it was Nick Hodges that said they might actually go to a release cycle that only every other release of Delphi was a breaking release. That would certainly be cool, but their component partners might not like that so much.

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