Pascal Expert 8.1, now with out-of-process option
Pascal Expert is our plugin for Delphi (RAD Studio). Its main task is to perform static code analysis. This plugin is a subset of our standalone flagship product Pascal Analyzer. It contains the most important reports, that you need to quickly find and remove bugs from your code.
In the latest Pascal Expert version 8.1 there is a new interesting possibility: Besides running analyses in a DLL (Peganza.DEngine32.dll) hosted by RAD Studio, it is now also possible to run in a separate process outside of the IDE.
The obvious advantage of this, is that the analysis now has access to much more memory. The separate process (PexRunner32.exe or PexRunner64.exe) communicates with RAD Studio and sends back the results, so the user experience will be almost the same as when running as a DLL. This means that the output even in this case will be presented on a tab page.
Running in the traditional way as a DLL means that Pascal Expert has to share memory with RAD Studio itself, all other third-party plugins, loaded source files etc. The problem is that very large Delphi projects with thousands of units (yes, there are those!) can simply not be analyzed. They could still be analyzed by the standalone Pascal Analyzer, but not from within RAD Studio by Pascal Expert. But this is now solved, because of the new out-of-process solution.
Another advantage of running out-of-process: The analysis has a very small impact on the performance of the IDE. This means that to continue working with your code while the analysis runs, will be much smoother.
Furthermore, running out-of-process gives you the option to run the analysis in 64-bits mode (well, your computer must be 64-bits obviously). This is normally a bit quicker than running in 32-bits, and gives of course access to more memory.
Another new feature for those of you that have not yet moved your code base beyond the Unicode barrier: Pascal Expert can from version 8.1 now also be used in Delphi 2007. So the full support range is from Delphi 2007 up to and including Delphi 10 Seattle. Support for new Delphi releases will be added as soon as they appear.