RAD Studio 10.3 has a number of performance improvements, as well as some quality improvements we’d like to share.

IDE Fix Pack

Some time ago, we licensed Andreas Hausladen’s IDE Fix Pack. This is an unofficial IDE addon that changes the behaviour of several things in the IDE, including fixing some bugs. Andreas kindly let us see the issues he had identified and integrate fixes.

In 10.3, we have integrated fixes for a number of these, and have developed different fixes for a number of other issues.

The most noticeable fix is to do with form opening time for complex forms in the designer, an issue related to LiveBindings, even if LiveBindings were not used for that specific form. The approach we ended up implementing has improved the performance by a factor of 27; that is, it is 27 times faster. An artificial test case with 10,000 controls which previously took 80 seconds to load now takes 3 seconds, and we anticipate real-world forms will be even faster.

IDE Startup Time

A nice thing to note is the steady speedup in startup time in recent versions of the IDE, both 10.2 and even more in 10.3. Here’s a comparison of warm startup time for 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3:

Warm startup time is when the IDE has already been open, and is closed and opened again. The methodology is to start the IDE; close it; and then measure the time from the double-click on a desktop shortcut until the IDE window displays. This includes time between when the shortcut is clicked but before the splash screen shows, and represents the true startup time of “time between when I click, and when the IDE is present.” The tests were performed on a Parallels VM running Windows 7 on an older 2011 MacBook Pro, which is not top of the line hardware and represents starting the IDE on a genuine, non-ideal machine. (A test on a – for example – 32-core, 128GB, 2018 machine would not be representative; this machine is likely older than many configurations our customers have and so represents an excellent real-world non-ideal case.)

Results for a cold startup (never opened, fresh boot) show similar speed increases in recent versions.

Overall

You can also view a full list of all 490 publicly reported fixed issues.

RAD Studio 10.3 has some very nice performance improvements and quality enhancements, speeding up both inside the IDE (especially form loading in the designer) and when you first start using it. Read more about what RAD Studio 10.3 includes!