Embarcadero is very happy to announce RAD Studio 12.3 Athens along with Delphi 12.3 and C++Builder 12.3 is available to customers starting today. The RAD Studio 12.3 Athens release offers the Initial Release of the 64-bit version of the RAD Studio IDE, along with a number of enhancements of existing features, and a significant focus on quality.
In this blog post, we are highlighting the key enhancements of this release and providing links with further information.
Table of Contents
Following the release of the new Clang-based C++ compiler for Win64 in RAD Studio 12.1 and its significant improvements in 12.2 (including consumption and production of runtime packages; CMake support; and parallelized CPU-saturating batch compilation, giving incredible compile performance), the new release offers additional quality improvements and some enhancements, including the official support for modern instruction sets up to AVX2 and even better compiler performance.
With this release, we also help developers improve their C++ code safety and quality by integrating Clang “sanitizers”, specifically the Address sanitizer and the Undefined Behavior sanitizer, which help catch problems in C++ code. These are highly useful for safe C++.
The new C++ code safety project options page
RAD Studio version 12.3 is updating to level 35 in the target API level for Delphi for Android, a requirement for Google Play Store apps by August 2025. While the primary goal is to target the new API level, the changes encompass multiple technologies and include a new NDK target, support 16 KB page sizes, new provisioning options and permissions. Overall, these improvements enable Delphi developers to continue building state-of-the-art Android apps targeting the most recent version of the Android OS.
In addition, we are releasing a visual tool to help manage the Android SDK installation: It’s called Android SDK Manager and it’s available in Delphi for customers with an active subscription. More on this tool in a specific blog post coming soon.
The new Android SDK Manager in Getit
To help our customers leverage AI LLMs for coding, RAD Studio 12.2 introduced an open architecture for AI plugins, offering ready-to-use support for three online solutions (OpenAI, Gemini by Google, and Claude by Anthropic) and one offline solution (Ollama). This architecture offers multiple goals: everything is optional and disabled by default; we make available multiple providers and let you choose which one or ones you want to enable; we include a locally installed, offline solution for maximum privacy.
RAD Studio 12.3 further improves Smart CodeInsight, adding a few notable extensions to the UI, focused on an enhanced chat experience, more integrated with the AI-related editor commands.
In 12.3, the Chat window now supports Markdown, offering a properly formatted and much more readable output, and it allows reading editor content, using special in-text commands or additional buttons. At the same time, the commands issued in the editor offer the option to send the results to the Markdown-enabled Chat window rather than the editor itself, providing a better formatting of the response. In addition, the Smart CodeInsight configuration dialog offers a list of available models retrieved from the AI engine and there is a new Find Unit / Find Header command based on AI.
RAD Studio 12.3 integrated AI chat pane offers Markdown support and a deeper integration with the IDE, thanks to the ability to create prompts based on code in the editor
The MarkDown formatted display of the chat window in 12.3 and the integration of editor content via macros
RAD Studio 12.3 introduces the Initial Release of a 64-bit IDE. While this Initial Release is limited in terms of available features, offering support only for the 64-bit Windows target platforms, it’s a very important milestone for the product. A 64-bit IDE offers almost unlimited memory space for the IDE itself, including for example the components installed and the designers open in the editor, and for the integrated compiler when building very large projects. In addition, a 64-bit IDE allows design time access to databases offering only a 64-bit client driver. Finally, we are building for the 64-bit IDE a new native Delphi debugger experience based on LLDB, which, over time, will offer much better features than the current remote debugging of 64-bit applications from the 32-bit IDE.
The Initial Release of the 64-bit IDE is a optional installation and it’s installed side by side with
the 32-bit IDE, which is still the default version. Developers can use either or both at once.
As the Initial Release, the 64-bit build of the IDE does not yet feature-match the 32-bit build of the IDE. The vast majority of features are present and it can be used as a ‘daily driver’ for Win64 development, with VCL and FMX design, coding, and debugging, including database support. However, in the initial release, developers can target Win64 but not other platforms (the 32-bit IDE of course continues to support all platforms); Visual Assist for C++ is not present; Type Library support (i.e. ActiveX and COM libraries) are not yet supported; and Delphi Refactorings and Metrics are not supported.
Separately, RAD Studio 12.3 includes also in the Professional edition the 64-bit binary version of the Delphi Win32 and Win64 compilers, offering the ability to build extremely large applications as a single executable from the 32-bit IDE. They were introduced in 12.2 in the Enterprise and Architects editions only, but are now available in all paid editions.
RAD Studio 12.3 64-bit IDE and 32-bit IDE work side-by-side
In terms of FireDAC and database access in general, the 12.3 release adds improvement to the filtering of SQL query from the TFDTable component and support for migrating from IBX to FireDAC with theRefind utility. It also adds specific support for 64-bit drivers access in the 64-bit IDE. In terms of specific database drivers, RAD Studio now officially supports:
RAD Studio version 12.2 introducedWebStencils, a server-side script-based integration and processing of HTML files to the WebBroker and RAD Server technologies. This flexible feature empowers you to develop modern websites based on any JavaScript library, powered by the data extracted and processed by a RAD Studio server-side application.
WebStencils’ main goal is to help with navigational websites based on RAD Studio web technologies (WebBroker, DataSnap, RAD Server) and providing server-side scripting: You can use WebStencils to generate HTML pages adopting any CSS and JavaScript libraries while retaining the generate the actual data in the pages (like the result of a database query) using Delphi or C++Builder. In addition, WebStencils can be a good foundation for HTMX as a web development solution.
In RAD Studio 12.3, WebStencils has been extended with access to nested objects and sub-tables in nested datasets, with a more flexible processing of the “@” symbol when unrelated to a WebStencils directive, and improvements in handling UTF8 characters.
The 12.3 release improves the quality of our Bluetooth and BLE support across all RAD Studio target platforms. The changes include also a new event, called when the BLE transmission configuration changes.
The Delphi Language Server Protocol engine powering CodeInsight has been further expanded in terms of quality and stability, improving the handling by the compiler when parsing code for LSP. In addition, both the 32-bit and the 64-bit IDE offer the ability to use the 64-bit version of the DelphiLSP engine for Windows targets, which offers better support for large codebases, having no memory limits. In 12.3, this 64-bit version is now available in all paid editions, including the Professional edition.
RAD Studio 12.3 has dozens of improvements to the core Delphi RTL (beside the Bluetooth changes mentioned earlier) and to both the VCL and FireMonkey UI libraries. Another focus area has been the WSDL importer and the SOAP invocation.
Worth calling out are the VCL quality work around VCL styles, HighDPI and other general UI quality improvements in VCL controls, and enhancements to the TImageCollection editor. For FireMonkey, this release adds a new tool to generate FireMonkey styles from VCL styles, an upgraded Skia4Delphi version, additional improvements to TMemo, to the dynamic style loading on non-Windows platforms, and to the Z-Order Manager on Windows.
With 12.3, we continue to deliver significant quality improvements to both of the UI libraries included in RAD Studio, addressing customer reports and proactively reworking the internal implementation of core and commonly used components to offer better performance and stability overall.
Since 12.2, RAD Server offers WebStencils integration, which adds Web development to the Web Service development capabilities of RAD Server. In addition, in 12.3, RAD Server improves the date and time formatting in JSON responses, includes an option to obfuscate the values for MasterSecret and Appsecret in emsserver.ini, adds the concept of instance-wide custom variables and a new EndpointHide attribute to hide endpoints.
Product trials for RAD Studio, Delphi and C++Builder 12.3 are now available and the updated product builds are live in the online store. Customers on Update Subscription can download and install RAD Studio, Delphi and C++Builder 12.3 today using their existing license and will receive an email announcing the new release availability. Downloads are available in the customers portal athttps://my.embarcadero.com.
For more information, you can check the following links:
We are very happy with the work our team did for RAD Studio 12.3 Athens and we are certain you’ll equally enjoy using this new version of RAD Studio, C++Builder, and Delphi.
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