XAILER FOR HARBOUR IS READY!

Well, to be honest, almost ready. A few details besides the complete debug are missing. But the 90% of Xailer is working nicely. Both the Xailer kernel and the OOP extensions have been ported with complete success, the complete Xailer run-time library, with all its controls, data source, and so on. The only things missing are the DLL creation support and the debugger, but we are already working on that. Also the IDE has been modified to be able to compile any project with xHarbour or Harbour (3.0).

For now all is done with BCC++. We have some code passed to MinGW, but on this first stage we want to make it work with BCC++, and when all is tested and we are sure everything works as expected, then we will make the jump to MinGW.

All our tests we have done so far are satisfactory, and we have check that the programs run a little bit quicker, consume less memory and the executable is a little bit smaller. Is not easy to give any statics, since it depends on how you do the test; some times you will gain more speed and less in others. However on a Ad-hoc test, we have achieved a speed increment of 75% against tje actual Xailer with xHarbour, which is not bad. This does not mean that your programs will run a 75% faster, since on any program there are many factors that can affect the performance, and only the operations that affect the OOP engine will be 75% faster. On the other hand and in general, Harbour is faster than xHarbour, so the improvement is guarantee.

On the jump to Harbour, we have try to minimize the possible differences between both compilers, so they do not affect to much on your actual Xailer programs. But I’m afraid some problems have been impossible to overcome, and every programmer must check all its programs to adapt them. In any case the changes are few and easy to fix. Here (in Spanish) you have a list will all the differences found from ourselves on the migration process. And here it is the official difference between both compilers: xhb-diff.txt.

Finally, although we have said on some occasions that Xailer 3.0 will work only with Harbour & MinGW, we are considering the possibility to publish a new version of Xailer 2.7 that will support xHarbour & Harbour through BCC++. The main objective is to debug Xailer & Harbour ASAP and your help can be great for that. If, in addition it serves to users that would like to recompile their programs taking the advantage of the best Harbour performance. If you want, you can use the comments to give us your opinion.