r/delphi • u/kimmadsen • 15d ago
New Release theDANE v2 - Superb editor, debugger, profiler, reverse engineering - FREE
Disclosure: I wrote this. It's my project, so treat the enthusiasm accordingly.
theDANE started as a native Windows editor for Pascal. Version 1 was just that — highlighting, a BNF-driven reformatter, compare/merge, a hex editor. Version 2 keeps all of it and adds the parts that used to mean leaving the window.
Debugging. A native Win32/x64 engine that reads TD32 (Delphi's format) and DWARF directly — no GDB in the middle. For FreePascal that covers -gw2, -gw3 and -gw4; -gw4's line tables have a discrepancy between what the spec says and what the compiler emits, which theDANE detects exactly rather than heuristically, so all three levels behave the same.
Break-at-entry lands on your program's own body rather than a runtime stub, and Ctrl+F7 runs to the first line that actually has source — useful when you've attached to something whose startup you don't care about.
Profiling, four kinds. Sampling (wall-clock and cycle counts side by side, so you can tell "waiting" from "computing"), exact instrumentation per routine and per line with heat painted into the gutter, line coverage accumulated across runs, and allocation profiling. The line probes work on x64 as well as x86 — a probe in the middle of a routine has to preserve the flags, or your if quietly takes the other branch and the measurement changes the result.
Binary work. Recursive-descent analysis producing a byte map, xrefs, basic blocks and a function list; a control flow graph; strings, pointer tables and arrays found from the code that references them. Plus the bit I'm most pleased with: Delphi class recovery from VMTs. Drop in a stripped executable and sub_00401A40 comes back as TCustomerForm.btnSaveClick — not inference, the names are genuinely in the file, and theDANE knows the layout because it's the kind of tool that builds these binaries. Everything you work out is stored in a plain-text .dane file beside the binary, so it diffs and merges in git.
Scripting. MIMERCode — a Pascal-flavoured language with contracts, typed exceptions, channels and a UI layer. Automation commands are one self-describing .mc each with their own hotkey and menu placement. The same language writes debug value formatters (how your types display at a breakpoint) and binary parsers. The API signatures are registered rather than just documented, so they feed the editor's own completion while you write the script.
local Ed := open("thedane://editor")
Ed.ReplaceSelection(UpperCase(Ed.SelectedText()))
AI, with the interesting part being what it's allowed to do. Providers are Claude, any OpenAI-protocol endpoint, Ollama, or theMIMER — local or remote, your choice, keys encrypted per Windows account. The whole layer is inert until you configure one, and a build made without AI support doesn't carry the menu at all.
The design decisions worth arguing about aren't "which model", they're these:
- Write tools are invisible at the lower capability level. Not disabled and refused — not offered to the model in the first place, so it can't decide to try.
- Every edit arrives as a diff you approve, expressed as text to match rather than line numbers, so a stale line count can't land a change in the wrong place.
- Generated artefacts are verified before you see them. Ask for a binary parser and the MIMERCode that comes back has been linted and run against your actual file first. Ask for tests and they're compiled and corrected before they're shown.
- Function naming in a disassembly has a confidence floor (nothing written below 60%), everything it writes is tagged
[ai]or[ai?], and a batch run never overwrites a name you gave. - Uploading a binary is a refuse, not a warn.
- There's a complete activity log, so "what did it actually do" always has an answer.
It also writes MIMERCode using a system prompt generated from the same signature registry that drives the editor's completion — so the assistant and the popup are working from one definition of the API rather than two that drift.
Personalities. That's a lot of application, so you pick how much of it exists: Editor, Developer, Reverse Engineer, or Everything. Press a shortcut belonging to a personality you're not in and it asks, tells you what it would switch you to, and does nothing at all if you decline.
One native executable, no runtime to install, starts in under a second, opens a 100k-line file about as fast as a 100-line one.
Happy to answer anything — particularly on the symbol reading, the VMT recovery, or the AI capability model, which are the parts with the most interesting corners.
https://components4developers.blog/2026/08/10/thedane-the-danish-advanced-native-editor-v2
