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

Returning to SlowCode


At the end of this chapter, I'll return to the now well-known SlowCode example. At the end of the previous chapter, we significantly adapted the code and ended with a version that calculates prime numbers with the Sieve of Eratosthenes (SlowCode_Sieve). That version processed 10 million numbers in 1,072 milliseconds. Let's see if we can improve that.

The obvious target for optimization is the Reverse function which creates the result by appending characters one at a time. We've seen in this chapter that modifying a string can cause frequent memory allocations:

function Reverse(s: string): string;
var
  ch: char;
begin
  Result := '';
  for ch in s do
    Result := ch + Result;
end;

Instead of optimizing this function, let's look at how it is used. The Filter method uses it to reverse a number:

reversed := StrToInt(Reverse(IntToStr(i)));

This statement brings in another memory allocation (in function IntToStr which creates a new string), and executes some code that has to...