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

Using object files


Before I jump into the complicated world of interfacing with C and C++, I'll introduce a simpler example—a library written in Delphi. The motivation for its use comes not from a bad algorithm that Mr. Smith wrote, but from a badly performing 64-bit compiler. This is not something that I am claiming without proof. Multiple Delphi programmers have pointed out that the 64-bit Windows compiler (dcc64) generates pretty bad floating point code that is 2-3 times slower than the floating point generated from an equivalent source by a C compiler.

When you have already explored all the standard approaches of speeding up the program, and the compiler is the only source of the problem, you cannot do much. You can only rewrite parts of the program in the assembler, or use an external library that works faster than the native code. Such a library will either use lots of assembler code or—most of the time—contain a bunch of object files compiled with an optimizing C compiler.

Sometimes...