Baking an Object Pascal and Raspberry Pie for the Holidays.

If you've not been living under a rock over the last couple of years, I'm certain you've noticed the recent release of the new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. Packed in this little not-much-bigger-than-a-playing-card form factor is a quad-core ARM Cortex A7 along with 1GB of RAM. It also sports HDMI video/audio, Ethernet, 4-USB ports and a programmable parallel port for peripheral interfacing. Booting several versions of Linux is a snap... but what about using your favorite language and mine, Object Pascal to target this device?

Give in to the ARC side

I thought I’d take a few moments (or more) to answer some questions regarding the just introduced Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) mechanism to Delphi on mobile platforms (namely iOS in XE4, and Android in a future release). Among some sectors of our customer base there seems to be some long-running discussions and kvetching about this change. I will also say that among many other sectors of our customer base, it’s been greeted with marked enthusiasm. Let’s start with some history…

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.