Book Image

Delphi High Performance

By : Primož Gabrijelčič
Book Image

Delphi High Performance

By: Primož Gabrijelčič

Overview of this book

Delphi is a cross-platform Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports rapid application development for Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Google Android, iOS, and now Linux with RAD Studio 10.2. This book will be your guide to build efficient high performance applications with Delphi. The book begins by explaining how to find performance bottlenecks and apply the correct algorithm to fix them. It will teach you how to improve your algorithms before taking you through parallel programming. You’ll then explore various tools to build highly concurrent applications. After that, you’ll delve into improving the performance of your code and master cross-platform RTL improvements. Finally, we’ll go through memory management with Delphi and you’ll see how to leverage several external libraries to write better performing programs. By the end of the book, you’ll have the knowledge to create high performance applications with Delphi.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we finally started learning to write parallel code. I started with a short introduction about processes and threads, single and multithreading, single-tasking, and multitasking. I also explained the most important differences between processes and threads.

After that, we started learning what not to do when writing multithreaded code. Firstly, I brought up the most important dogma—"Never access the user interface from a background thread". Such strong words deserve proof and I gave you one.

In the next, largest part of the chapter, I slowly explained why you should be extremely careful if you want to access shared data from multiple threads. While simultaneous reading is OK, you should always use protection when reading and writing at the same time.

In the context of parallel programming and data sharing, this protection is implemented by the introduction of one of the synchronization mechanisms. I spent quite some time introducing critical sections, mutexes, semaphors...