In the 18+ years Delphi has been out, some rather large applications having been built. Between the number of units developers are using, the size of the component sets installed in the IDE and the transition to the Galileo IDE with .NET subsystems, Delphi now requires more memory than ever. What is interesting is that Delphi is still a 32 bit IDE even after release of the 64 bit compiler. In the old days when Delphi was built using the Object Pascal compiler, one would have thought a 64 bit version would be forthcoming shortly after the compiler was available.
I would venture that most developers run a 64 bit version of Windows natively or in a VM for development so it begs the question as to why a 64 bit version of Delphi is not at least available. Apple’s testing showed compiling their desktop software for 64 bit provided for about a 20% speed gain. Pretty impressive for just a re-compile.
In addition to a performance benefit, 64 bit apps of course have access to more memory. Considering the Out of Memory issues perhaps the additional memory would have at least delayed failure of the IDE. Even more interesting is the fact that the current bds.exe is not Large Address Aware.
Delphi is not Large Address Aware
This could have been enabled by simply adding the {$SetPEFlags IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE} to the project.
If you are experiencing Out of Memory issues you could of course use a utility like PE Viewer to make the EXE large address aware, but then you would get directed here the next time you launch Delphi because the copy protection code would prevent it from launching.
Isn’t it about time that EMBT supported 64 bit OS/X apps, and a 64 bit version of Delphi or at least made Delphi Large Address Aware?