One of the things that intrigued me about the new Rad Studio 10.4.2 release was the improved compiler performance. Because Delphi is a fast compiler –we all know that– but hey, it can always be faster. And 10 seconds in every compile end up counting for a lot of time over the days.

So I tried it compiling FlexCel and its test suite. Over a million lines of code, and actual code. This isn’t a synthetic benchmark with a single unit and a million lines of “WriteLn(‘Hello world’);”. We have lots of generics, a little more than 3000 units, multiple includes, cycles of units that use themselves recursively, and complex dependencies.  It turns out that spreadsheets require a lot of code.

Below you can find a small video, with Rad Studio 10.4.2 on your left and 10.3 on your right. I normally wait a while before adopting a new Delphi version, but given all the time I spend compiling FlexCel, I migrated to 10.4.2 yesterday. This is the type of improvements I want from Embarcadero, and I hope they deliver more.