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

TThread


Multithreading support has been built into Delphi since its inception.

The very first 32-bit version, Delphi 2, introduced a TThread class. At that time, TThread was a very simple wrapper around the Windows CreateThread function. In later Delphi releases, TThread was extended with multiple functions and with support for other operating systems, but it still remained a pretty basic tool.

The biggest problem with TThread is that it doesn't enforce the use of any programming patterns. Because of that, you can use it to create parallel programs that are hard to understand, hard to debug, and which work purely by luck. I should know—I shudder every time I have to maintain my old TThread-based code. 

Still, the TThread approach can be very effective and completely readable, provided that you use it correctly. On the next pages, I'll firstly show the basic TThread usage patterns and then improve the basic approach by introducing the communication techniques into the old framework.

A TThread...